News 8 in Vegas reported a story on Monday about a professional video poker player who is now hawking classes and books about video poker:

Professional gambler Bob Dancer says he turned $6,000 into a million with just 6 months of play. At the Fiesta Rancho he's teaching others the strategy he used to cash in.

Link to story. The first rule about people selling information that supposedly made them millionaires is that if they are millionaires it's probably from selling the information, not using it.

Let's take a closer look at Bob Dancer's claim anyway. First things first: the statement above is misleading. Bob Dancer's "$6,000 bankroll" is what he claims he arrived in Vegas with almost ten years ago (Link). It's almost impossible to turn $6,000 into $1m in any endeavor, including the highly lucrative field of professional video poker (sarcasm).

He claims that he and his wife won $1 million between September 2000 and March 2001. So while he made the $1m over six months, that was 6 years after he first arrived in Vegas with $6,000 and a dream. Also, does this mean that he made $1 million in profit, or that his winning hands totaled $1 million collected? It's not clear.

Let's assume it was $1 million in profit. Is this even possible? The easy answer is yes, if you're extremely lucky. It would only require a few jackpots at lucrative levels to hit $1m in profit, but you would need to be exceptionally lucky and you would never expect to have the same luck again in your life.

The harder answer is yes, if you're playing the right amount of money, in the right machines, for the right amount of time. Bob Dancer is primarily concerned with that holy grail of video poker: machines with a payout table that optimally pays out 100.76%. These are machines that, if you play perfect strategy, over time (a long time) you are going to make money at.

It's said that a professional video poker player can play around 1,000 hands per hour. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. It requires intense concentration to get in almost one hand every three seconds (and not many bathroom / drink breaks!).

Let's say you've found a 100.76% payout machine, and you can play perfect video poker at 1,000 hands per hour. If that is a 25 cent machine, and you play 5 credits per hand, you'll be averaging about $9.50 per hour in profit over the long run. If you are able to play this machine for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks of the year, you will make $1m in profit -- after 105,263,158 hands and 52.63 years.

If it's a $5 machine, and you play five credits per hand, you'll get to $1m much faster -- in 2.63 years. And if it's a $25 machine, you could theoretically be clearing $950 an hour -- and get to $1m in profit in just over six months.

We've made a lot of assumptions so far, about bankroll, machine availability, your playing ability, and the stakes being played. Even if these applied, there's a big obstacle to making insane bank -- your bankroll.

Video poker is not a low-risk game. It is a game with long periods of gradually losing money, punctuated by large jackpots. If you expect to hit a jackpot once every x thousand hands, it may be 2x, 3x or 20x until one actually comes, just as you may sit down and hit one in the first hour.

The Wizard of Odds has posted the best reference I've seen about bankroll size here. It correlates "Risk of Ruin" - the odds of losing your entire stake - with bankroll size.

Let's say you want to start small, at $1.25 per play, to make your $9.50 an hour playing video poker, and you want less than a 1% chance of losing all your hard-earned kwan. You'll need a bankroll of $8,810 dedicated to your "profession." That's just to get $9.50 an hour. If you found a good $125 per play machine and wanted to make your $1m in half a year, you'd need a bankroll of $881,000. Personally, if I already had almost a million dollars, a) I wouldn't be a professional video poker player, and b) I would probably want a less than 1% chance of losing every penny of it! It's also worth mentioning that if you played at that level with a bankroll of less than $132,625 you'd have worse than a 50% likelihood of going bust.

All that said, I don't know if Bob Dancer is selling snake oil or not. His columns on Video Poker actually appear to be very well written, including this one which actually covers one of the common misconceptions about bankrolls. His writings and software appear to be pretty well-regarded online. And although I doubt he's promising this, the news piece made it sound like he was teaching people how to turn $6,000 into $1m in six months, which is most certainly a pipe dream.

Being a professional video poker player appeals to a very narrow set of people, and requires a really specific type of personality and mind. As for me, I'd probably go insane (not to mention deaf and blind) if I tried to make a living by playing 8,000 hands of perfect video poker every day.

I liked your commentary on the article.

Posted by: zeke Quezada on July 24, 2003 05:41 PM

the key phrase in your post is "perfect play"

there are very few of us who can maintain perfect play for five hours in a poker tournament much less all day long. i cant even imagine trying to do it on a video poker machine with many more hands per hour.

Posted by: mr. helpful on July 24, 2003 10:57 PM

Yeah, exactly. Playing perfect video poker is all about situational memory; it's like memorizing basic strategy for blackjack but much less intuitive and there's more to remember. I doubt more than 0.1% of people can play perfectly at 1,000 hands an hour for 8 hours a day. Even that may be generous, although it's probably a skill that would show pretty good improvement with large amounts of practice. There are PC software trainers available that apparently are quite good.

Posted by: jeremy on July 24, 2003 11:59 PM

And even if you could play perfectly, why the heck would you want to? That kind of life makes hammering widgets on an assembly line seem glamorous by comparison.

Posted by: Ken Goldstein on July 28, 2003 07:48 PM

Please send me the casinos that I can play casinowar with cent.Thanks.

Posted by: ekrem on October 10, 2003 10:29 AM

What Mr. Dancer doesn't tell you - and none of his critics do either - is that perfect play to achieve an expected theoretical payback assumes that all hands occur with their expected probability in a set period of time or number of plays. Of course, if this happens, the game is obviously rigged. If this doesn't happen, well, how good really is perfect play? If I make a less-than-perfect decision that results in a better outcome than the so-called perfect play for that hand, I've bucked the system with a better end result.

Mr. Dancer is a windbag of theory, and that's all he sells. Perhaps that's why he chose to hide behind a pseudonym. Fortunately for him, the idiot gaming public would rather buy pipe-dream theory than take good sense reality for free.

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