Harry wrote:
>I hope I won't be excessive in adding on to Tom's sensible reply ...
>
>Generally speaking, the more aggressively you play for a RF hit, the greater your expected loss per hand between royals (at the extreme, you're tossing paying pairs, e.g.) But the fact that you shorten the royal cycle at the same time serves to soften that cost.
There were machines in Lake Tahoe that had more than a 10% hold. The
player who introduced me to the concept of drawing less aggressively
to the royal for the sake of extending the play wanted to, for the
sake of being conservative, not draw to the royal on a type of hand
that normally adds great fluctuation to a play, but in this case
reduced the cycle by more than it increased the cost per hand, thus,
overall, reducing the cost to hit the jackpot. I had to point out to
him that the conservative approach, overall, besides the more
profitable one, was to be more aggressive on that type of hand.
>The $64 question is at what point do you optimize the tradeoff between these two effects? I take it on faith that (ignoring meter advance) a strategy based on a meter that yields a 100% ER minimizes loss between royals.
>
>I imagine it takes a bit of calculus to demonstrate this (I also expect an inductive proof ... one in which you assume an opposite assumption and then demonstrate that it yields a contradiction with known fact, would also crack the problem). The point is, unlike much in vp, a little applied algebra isn't going to do the job.
I never necessarily formally proved it. I just made a list of how
much it cost to hit the jackpot with various strategies and saw that
it converged to its lowest point at the point at which it broke even.
>In these discussions, I try hard to not miss the "forest for the trees". It's easy to get lost in the myriad minor considerations. For that reason, I personally would prefer to steer clear of Tom's refinement (setting strategy at 100% - prog adv rate ... which is spot on in maximizing expected profit). Please bear in mind that in most cases, we're typically talking of a distinction that tallies to less than a penny or two an hour.)
It can be negligible and overestimated, although when Harrah's Marina
in Atlantic City had 3% meters on several banks of $1 6/5 Jacks or
Better machines and a team often locked them up and then played as if
they had infinite competition, I estimated the cost to them from doing
that per year to be 5 figures.
