State calls Bloomy bluff, gloms OTB; Takeout up 1%

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by Cannon Shell

I see what you are saying but blackjack and poker are still the same game regardless of what casino they are played at. Ellis Park is a far different product than most are used to. If you dont play the track regularly then the takeout is not nearly as big of a draw. I dont think bigger players thought that it was worth their time to study Ellis for 1 pick 4 a day especially when the pools figured to be small as compared to the big tracks. I think that lower takeout is always better but it will take time for it to payoff, you cant expect it to jump overnight

That's a good response, CS, but it's not always true that blackjack is the same game regardless of the casino. I flew to Korea for a good game several years ago. They had a rule that if you made a 5-card hand, you could accept a half-win and be out of the hand. (a $100 bet would be paid $50 profit). That rule changes basic blackjack strategy substantially. It becomes correct to hit a 4-card 15 vs dealer 2, for example. And what do you think is the correct way to play a 5-card 19? Anyone going to play that game would have to learn the correct way to play with that rule, or he/she'd be giving up a lot of edge. I wasn't the only serious blackjack player to make that trip. I lasted 3 weeks until casino management decided that maybe I wasn't in Korea on Import/Export business after all.

I could give many other rules variations that require a fair amount of new study to capitalize on the rule (eg, multiple card surrender, over/under 13, double exposure), but I don't dispute that mastering a new track when you are highly proficient on another circuit would probably be harder than learning any of the blackjack strategy changes. Handicapping is way more complicated than learning how to play blackjack correctly. Still, in blackack, the difference between a great game and a typical game is an off-the-top edge of around 2%. For that kind of difference, serious blackjack players will flock to the game. With Ellis vs Saratoga, we're talking about a difference of 21%. And hardly anybody showed up.

A month ago, I put in about 20 hours of video poker practice time because of a Las Vegas promotion I heard about. The video poker game of choice at this casino was not one I knew how to play, but it never occured to me to think "I already know how to play Jacks-Or-Better, I'll just go play JOB somewhere else, even though my hourly expectation will be 1/10th of what I can get if I learn this new game. I learned it. And to further the analogy, the promotion was off-Strip. (It would make a better story if it was at the Ellis Island casino, but it wasn't.) There were so many sharp video poker players there (because sharp video poker players will swarm a game that turns a -0.3% edge into a +0.4% edge) that I had to set an alarm for 3am to get on one of the machines of choice.

But even if I concede that learning a new track is harder than learning a complicated video poker strategy, serious players should STILL have thrown some money at the Ellis Pick4. I made the point at the time that a dart thrower could fill out a $200 ticket every day based on his favorite numbers, and would be giving up just $8/day in expected loss. I don't think most horse players, even reasonably sophisticated ones, understand 'expected loss'. They look at a $200 ticket at a venue that they don't know anything about as $200 down the drain. I looked at it as an $8 investment in the future of the game. (My tickets actually averaged closer to $300, so a $12/day investment in the future of the game, in my case.) It was a lonely vision.

--Dunbar