Here's why good poker players go broke playing casino games
Do you think skilled poker pros aren't foolish enough to throw away their money playing horrible odds casino games -- especially if better variants are easily available?
Think again!
Jason Somerville posted this screen shot of a nice hit at $50-per-hand video poker:
What's wrong here? The paytables! He was playing 9-5 Double Double Bonus Poker, which returns less than 98% even with perfect play (which I doubt he was doing, as that's not an intuitive game to play perfectly). That's a HORRENDOUS paytable for such a high limit machine.
Then some other guy responded with his own video of a win:
This was a bit of a weird machine, as it's a 10 credit machine, meaning at $1/credit, he's playing $10 per hand (usually it's 5 credits per hand).
Anyway, he was playing what's known as 30-6-5 Bonus Poker, which has a shockingly bad 96.18% return.
But back to Somerville.
Ignoring the quad aces he hit, how much could he expect to lose at such a machine?
You only hit royal flushes on an average of once every 40,000 hands. Yet that accounts for 2% of the payback at his game. This means that the game will return 95.88% of coin-in with average luck when you're not hitting a royal.
If he runs 500 hands per hour (which is very average speed for someone familiar with the game), he's averaging $1k of loss per hour if he's running 500 hands, running average other than failing to hit a royal!
Even working the royal into the equation, he's still losing $533 per hour on average. Plus there's a ton of variance, and he can lose far, far more than that if he's running bad.
Playing video poker without a full understanding of the strategy AND the right paytables is a very
:baddecision
To Somerville's credit, when this was brought up to him, he quickly admitted he was unaware of the paytable thing, and claimed he won't make that mistake again.
