Customer Reviews

John Patrick's Video Poker: The Complete Guide to Playing and Winning

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The author, a self described "professional gambler", simply doesn't understand the game of video poker. While he jokes about being a high school dropout with "street smarts", he unfortunately doesn't understand anything about probability theory or the expected value of return calcultions required to optimize the return on what potentially can be one of the few potentially profitable casino games. In short, his advise on how to play video poker contain many mathemetical errors if optimizing return is your goal.

First he starts by telling you should play table blackjack instead, but if you are too timid to try to learn blackjack, you can minimize your losses by playing video poker his way. He doesn't seem to understand certain video poker games are positive expectation games (unlike blackjack, unless you can track the cards). His advice will quickly turn a positive expectation game (e.g., Duces Wild has a 100.7% expected payback if played flawlessly) into a negative one. One glaring example of his ignorance is "play the minimum for awhile until you see how he machine is paying". The fact is the greatest expected return is achieved by always playing max coins. He doesn't seem to understand each hand is a completely independent event from the prior hand. Some of the hands he says to "hold" are just wrong.

Parting shot: if the author is such as clever professional gambler why does he need to write books like this to make money?

As a long time JP follower this book has been the greatest, in casino help. One read will not do it, because there are many pieces to put together. I normally use parts of seven different chapters that apply strictly to VP. The general advice is in all the books. John does not fault folks who are more conservative than he is. I survey many machines; and will be gone @ 3-in-a-row. I recently purchased a second copy for a friend, as I will not lend out any of my JP books.