Poker Poker Poker!: [vpFREE] Re: Bob Dancer's LVA

Bob wrote on going broke: "How much attention do I pay to the Kelly criterion when I play video poker today? NONE AT ALL."

Sorry to hear that. Of course it's quite possible that your bankroll has become too large for video poker. You might need something that offers larger bet sizes. You could go into the stock market like Bill Gross.

Bob wrote: "The numbers NOTI publishes concerning playing 25 cent FPDW forever are of no interest to me as a gambler (although they are of interest to me as a video poker writer and teacher). I am likely never going to play that game because 25 cent single-line games are of no interest to me whatsoever."

I use FPDW as a common example, I leave it up to others to translate to their particular situations. Even today it is still a game that can be found, so it is not irrelevant to video poker. True, the earnings rate at quarters is on par with the minimum wage for a skilled player, but it might beat driving a bus from the airport to casinos as you mentioned as a backup plan. On the plus side the alcohol is free to FPDW players and there is no blood test or fbi background check required and you get to set your own hours.

Bob wrote: "Most of these formulae assume that we have a fixed bankroll --- with no extraneous inputs (perhaps income from a job, alimony, Social Security, a pension, etc.) or outputs (rent, our car needs a new transmission, expensive hobbies, etc.)"

Other inputs and outputs can be modeled as changes to EV. This is frequently put forth as a weakness to the Kelly system, but it's not at all. Of course there are other inputs and outputs, and they do count, model them as changes to EV. If your gambling is putting $10/hour into your bankroll and you put another $10/hour into your bankroll from your day job, your net EV into your bankroll is $20/hour.

Bob wrote: "I play in a world of murkier numbers."

Actually, we all do. Even the FPDW player is unlikely to get the computer optimal EV, instead there is some error rate which results in an actual EV of something less than computer optimal. The random number generator in the machine is not a true random number generator, it is a pseudo-random number generator, close but again some murkiness is involved. This is an issue with using the Kelly system, the common workaround is to bet less than Kelly so there is some margin of error. Typically applying math to the real world requires using some margin of error.

Bob wrote: "I'm not aware of video poker players going broke because they were expertly playing too big a game --- and got eaten alive by the variance. The ones I've heard of going broke are the ones who are no longer playing with an advantage. "

There's that word "advantage" again. I assume you meant "playing with an edge". I know a number of gamblers who went broke by gambling over their head (another way to say gambling over their bankroll) even though they clearly had an edge. It's surprisingly easy to do, in my experience. On thing video poker and poker has is variance, variance in spades you could say. I'm not saying you can ignore edge, edge is important, but so is variance. Assuming an edge, it's the variance that's the problem, it's the variance that can destroy bankrolls.

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