The cost of errors in video poker

 For anyone who has become a regular customer to video poker machines should know that there could be a huge cost when playing video poker.

For those who like everything fast paced know that speeding in video poker can increase with experience, but can be critical if only in the beginning stages of play.

The downsides to speeding in video poker can be detrimental when you all of sudden will be found holding the wrong cards and drawing before fully thinking things over. Maybe sometimes these mistakes will happen if you have a sticky button on a raw machine. This means the card was held even though you didn’t press hold on the video poker machine. It doesn’t matter what happened – the cost of the error was because you were playing too fast.

Realizing that deviations from optimum play cost money, you probably slowed down in order to avoid another error. But have you ever thought about how much the reduced speed costs in terms of your overall expectancy? Playing video poker at too slow a pace can end up costing you even more.

The only trade-off here is that speed is important if used proportionately properly with accuracy then you will have the best kind of stability.

So, what is the best way to make this happen in your video poker play? Here are some guidelines, just for that.

If the accuracy of your play remained constant in video poker, then your per-hour expectancy would vary linearly with your playing speed.

Probably one of the best examples when playing video poker comes with Precision Play in a full-pay Deuces Wild will yield 100.75 percent long-term payback.

If you played only 300 hands per hour on a 5-coin video poker quarter machine, your expectancy is an average gain of 0.75 percent of 300 x $1.25, or $2.81 per hour. At 600 hands per hour your expected win rate would be doubled to $5.62 per hour, and so on. If you could play 1,000 hands/hour, your expectancy would be $9.37 per hour, but any errors will obviously reduce these rates.

If in your video poker play you come out with a positive expectancy (which is assumed in the following discussion), much can be gained by speedy play. The problem is that faster the video poker play gives us less time to evaluate each hand, so we are more likely to make errors. So, then at what point do the errors cost the most, but gain through speed?

Your expected win rate in video poker with consistently accurate play is a straight line starting at zero and sloping up (the top line in Figure 1). With optimum play on full pay of video poker Deuces Wild, this line has a 0.0075 positive slope. The cost of errors will begin at zero and go on a downward spiral.

If the play is accurate at zero then in video poker the slope will seem steeper, making your error rates an increase.