Went scouting yesterday for blackjack games with good rules and low minimums. Didn't find any. Turned my eye to video poker, which is a losing game off the bat but can become positive if the payouts are "correct" and the mailers are decent. I was going to play a little bit to make the trip "worth it" but the payouts needed to be "correct". It would still be losing but that day I was willing to do that.
Looked at Jacks or Better: 6:5.
For all denoms.
5% house edge.
The best you got was 8:6 in the high limit room at $25 per coin.
At $25/coin I expect 9:6 and nothing less.
Then there was Bonus Poker. I don't recall the actual pay table but I DO remember that they whacked the two pair pay to 5 coins. Full pay bonus poker pays 10 for two pair.
No thank you.
For kicks I checked the Deuces wild. I'm not as familiar with this game "on sight" like I am Jacks and Bonus but when I saw that 3 of a kind and straights paid the same I figured something was wrong. I saw that 5 of a kinds paid 50. I KNEW that was wrong and I also knew that completely wrecked the expected return.
When I put it into the Wizard of Odds calculator:
6% house edge.
So say you put in $200 and play 500 hands per hour. at 25cent per coin, you're playing $625/hour. You've lost $37.50 in that hour. In 3 hours you've lost half your buy-in. And that's just on the EV. Actual Value can mean your $200 is gone in an hour or less. Particularly if you fail to:
1) Play perfect strategy
2) Are unfortunate enough to not hit a 5 of a kind OR 4 deuces in that session.
Yet there were people playing. Me? I went home.
Why? Take that JoB game. at it's proper payout (9-6) the house edge is about .5% So that same $200 with 500 hands/hour and $625/hour (and that's a SLOW rate). The expected loss is $3.12. I can play for quite a long time. Again, Actual Value will be far more or less than that but why would I volunteer to lose $37 for a game I should only lose $3?
Maybe that's OK with you. It's not OK with me. Apparently, it's OK with the people playing...assuming they even did the math and....I doubt that. But that's another problem for another day.
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