Customer Reviews

The Frugal Video Poker Scouting Guide

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This may seem a little pricey for what you get (3.5" x 7" inches, and 34 pages), but if you consider the time it would take you to compile 37 VP games and almost 200 pay tables, into a compact little easy to read notebook that you can carry with you to the casinos...it's really a bargain, and a necessary tool for any recreational or serious VP player.

The guide is essential for separating the good VP machines from the bad ones. There are nine pay tables for Deuces Wild that range from 100.76% to 94.82% returns, eight pay tables for Jacks or Better, seven pay tables for Double Bonus Poker, nine for Double Double Bonus Poker, eight for Joker Poker, and many more.

The progressive totals are also a nice feature of the guide. Most of us wouldn't touch a Jacks or Better machine that only had a 95% return, but did you know that you could play it if it was a progressive and paid $3,085 or more? It's the little things like that, and the Multi-Strike and Super Times Pay return percentages that show this was a well thought out guide.

I only have one small complaint about the guide; I wish it were about one or two inches shorter so that it could fit in your back pocket without sticking out. The longer pay tables could easily be continued on the next page, and if they had to add a couple of pages to the guide to compensate for shortening the pages, that wouldn't really be a problem since it is only about an eighth of an inch thick. Jean or Viktor, hope your listening ;)

This book is exactly what is claims to be. It's a pocket guide that takes the guess work out of determining the payback percentage on all the popular video poker games and then some. The volatility ratings are a nice touch and are very helpful in determining what games to play based on the size of your bankroll.

Finally - just the book I've been waiting for. As long as I've been playing video poker, I've yearned for handy listing of the percent payback for the various games and paytables associated with them. I'd even started building the tables myself from numerous books on the subject of Video Poker. My efforts were never satisfactory because I never seemed to have the value for the machine I was standing in front of at the time - i.e. when I really needed it. This book is nearly perfect. It has numerous precentages for all (I haven't found one missing yet) each of the popular games that you find in casinos these days with various permutations of their paytables - sadly these are mostly NOT to the players advantage, but the authors' can't be faulted for that. My only complaint is the spiral-bound book is a smidge long for the average man's pocket and has a lame textual style for the little prose it contains that uses a sailor-schtick which I found a bit inappropriate. However, you don't buy this for the prose - you buy it for the NUMBERS and the numbers are just fine.

I used to print volumes of paper to try to carry this information with me to the casinos. This handy little guide replaces all of that.

While the book is pricey for its length, the idea is interesting. It verifies that casinos have tweaked video poker machines to make the odds worse.

The Frugal Video Poker scouting guide is not a guide for playing video poker. There is no strategy on how to play the different video poker machines. The book is a compilation of the different payoff tables for each machine. It is a guide for selecting the best machines to play based on the payoff schedule. The Frugal Guide does not have any information on the best strategy (how to play) the different machines.

buy this book if you are interested in video poker and even the software you can find by the same title but save your money and don,t buy the guide.