Bloggasm

I lived my Poker-playing days in a small college town, where kids would look over stacks of chips that were bought with money they shouldn’t be spending. When a hurricane turned into a tropical storm and hit the north-east coast, we watched out the window as trees and limbs fell, knowing that at some point at the end of the night we’d have to put down our cards and venture out into the wind-wrecked campus back to our respective dorms. When I talked to my parents and poker came into the conversation, I downplayed how much we were actually playing, hinting that it was just a “weekend thing,” knowing that I had stayed up until two in the morning the night before only to get up the next day for a morning class. My mom, in growing concern, said that I was throwing away money that I didn’t have to spend, and it eventually got to the point where I hardly mentioned poker to them at all.

To add to the whole fiasco, I’d stumbled upon several free poker sites (I never got hooked on paid ones, thank God), and whenver there wasn’t a real poker game to be had, I spent long hours casting bets with fake money, the back of my head also lit up with the glow of my roommate’s computer screen behind me as he logged into the same site. The only time we’d speak would be the announce which room we were about to enter, hurrying to scramble inside so we could both play at the same time. Then it was complete silence: neither one of us were allowed to turn around and see the hand on our computer screens, and we’d wage battles until the early hours of the morning.

Never once, however, did I really try to measure how my real-life poker playing changed after I started playing online. Surely, there must be some kind of mathematical muscle in your brain that gets its daily workout from playing online, but at the same time every ounce of logic wants to tell you that the two sports –online poker and real poker — are not the same. How could playing anonymous screen names without faces ever prepare you for the tell-tale signs in a person’s mouth or eyes when he is bluffing? How could pixeled poker chips on the screen ever be as real or treasured as weighty clay chips that clink and clang together when you fiddle with them nervously?

So what this all comes down to is: What are some strategies in video poker that you’ll never learn from simply playing real poker?

Here’s some good tips:

When you see me or anyone else write about expert strategy in video poker, there are a couple of important things to keep in mind:

Video poker is not just one game, and there is no one expert strategy…

…9-6 Jacks or Better: Toss away the entire hand. You’ll average a 1.8-coin return per five coins wagered by chucking it all and hoping for a good draw, compared with a 1.73-coin return for the next best option, hold the 2, 8 and 10 of hearts and hoping for a long-shot draw to a flush, with two pair and three of a kind also possible.

10-7-5 Double Bonus Poker: The enhanced 5-for-1 payback on straights in Double Bonus means we try for inside straight draws that we wouldn’t bother with on other games. By holding the 6-8-9-10 of mixed suits, with have a 4-in-47 chance of pulling one of the four 7s to complete a straight. Our average return is 2.13 coins per five wagered. And since flushes pay 7-for-1 in this game, our next best option is to hold the three hearts, with an average return of 1.82 coins.

There’s more advice if you follow the link. Personally, I quit playing video poker long ago (and so has my roommate), but every now and then when we happen to flip across a poker star on tv or someone brings up the sport in conversation, we’ll often look at each other, and one of us inevitably will say something like “We should start playing again.” Maybe it’s for the best that we never follow through on that statement.