The Hard Part of Video Tilt Poker

Sometimes while playing quarter video poker, you’ll lose $500 a day for three days straight. Or when playing for dollars, you’ll lose $2,000 a day for three days straight. How does that affect your well being? And if you’re married, how do you convince your wife that it’s just a normal swing of the game and that she doesn’t have to worry about it?

Some people are always in debt. These people, for whatever full tilt poker reason, can’t get a bankroll to gamble with. And even if they somehow did, they couldn’t hang onto it. Are you one of these people?

A casino is full of distractions. Every casino has an advantage on perhaps 99% of all bets available. Do you have the discipline to limit yourself completely to the remaining 1%?

The casino will ply you with free booze served by attractive provocatively dressed young ladies who are teaching poker. The casino doesn’t care whether it’s the liquor or the ladies that ruins your concentration. Either way you fail is fine with them. Can you run that gauntlet and still concentrate on the game?

The casinos hire talented marketing people who dream up incentives for you to come and visit. Some incentives are extremely valuable and some are not. Can you distinguish between them?

On those rare nights when you win win win, can you keep your perspective and not go out and blow it? On those not-so- rare nights when you lose lose lose, can you deal with the actual loss of your bankroll, plus that ugly sickening feeling too? When it takes three years to build a bankroll and you lose half of it in a week, can you still function?

Full Tilt Poker in Casinos

Playing in smoky casinos, sitting under air-conditioning vents on uncomfortable stools, and using the same muscles over and over and over again lead to a variety of ailments. Eating free food in a casino night after night has caused many of us to gain far more weight than is desirable. But to play the game you have to survive all of this. Can you?
Is it a problem when people look down on you, because they feel that being a gambler is an unproductive way to lead a life? And if you become real good, can you keep that fact a secret from the casinos so you can continue to play?

If you believe that telling the truth is always the best policy, then you probably don’t have sufficient guile to succeed at this sport. Things are not always black and white here. Sometimes the poker pressures to push the envelope are enormous. The low road is sometimes more lucrative than the high road, but the risks are enormous if you don’t succeed. Do you look good in stripes?

Can you deal with the repetition? Video poker is a very boring game when you play it 40 hours a week. Playing perfectly at home for 10 minutes at a time is a lot different from playing hour after hour after hour in a casino. Jeffrey Compton, my friend and business partner, has learned Jacks or Better perfectly and can play it well for an hour or two at a time. But if he has to sit at

a machine for longer than that, he starts to make a large number of errors. So even though he has learned the game perfectly, he’s unlikely ever to become a successful professional player.

Slot clubs provide lots of benefits to players. The most successful players study these slot clubs two ways from Tuesday until they know exactly how to extract the most from them. Can you do this?

The game is getting more difficult. ‘When I started my video poker career in 1994, players told me about the “good old days” five years earlier when full-pay dollar Deuces Wild could be found all over town. Today, the games are not nearly as lucrative as they were when I started. It’s reasonable to assume that in two years there will be fewer profitable opportunities yet. Can you keep current enough to stay ahead of the game?

You get my point. Mastering the correct way to play the hands just gets you to first base. This is absolutely necessary for success, but you still have a lot of work to do once you reach that point. Playing the hands is definitely a worthy subject for a book on video poker; indeed, the Winner’s Guide series that I’ve co-written with Liam W. Daily deals with this subject, but this book doesn’t.

Thousands of people have reached first base in video poker, but haven’t done so well after getting there. This book briefly describes howl did it, but mostly dwells on how I hit subsequent doubles and triples, then finally my million-dollar home run.

Many of the specifics I write about here are one-of-a-kind and probably won’t come around again in exactly the same way. But the same types of choices will arise and the tools I used to deal with them in the past will be the same ones I’ll use in the future. ‘Whether these are useful tools for you to use, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

A large part of my success was a winning attitude—knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em, as it were. This I can share with you, but my philosophy won’t work for you until you modify it to fit your own strengths and we