Getting The Singer Play Strategy (SPS) Right
We've seen it multiple times over the years: I print the hard truths about Advantage Play being nothing more than a state of mind that APer's utilize in order to justify both their consistent losing and their playing far more than they should. It is, in short, a simple way to cover-up a gambling addiction that they have no way out of.
The fallout from such stinging straight talk has been the AP community constantly passing on a whole lot of misinformation on how SPS actually works. And although I know of NO ONE who has been able to understand the entire strategy and play it exactly as I have done over the years, forum critics, out of clear frustration, pretend to know it and its supposed dangerous pitfalls (aka labeling it as a "Martingale") either from reading other unknowledgeable critics' postings or by making believe they've done mathematical analyses of SPS when they have, at best, a 60% total comprehension of the math and the facts that went into its development.
So today, on Alan Best Buys' Forum, you will see the facts. You will be able to separate the fiction going around about my strategy by people who mistakenly believe that the math in video poker can duplicate the math in classroom books; you will understand that the $2500 minimum win goal/session is just that--a minimum win goal, and that many wins are much larger than the minimum; you will FINALLY understand that the huge winners occur much more often than the huge losers, and that the infrequent huge losers are completely incapable of wiping out the many smaller winners in the process; and, it will finally hit you that the special plays which deviate from optimal strategy, which are used around 5% of the time, have nothing to do with reducing long-term expected return and in fact, have EVERYTHING to do with increasing the probability of short-term profitability.
--I played 427 sessions during my 10 years as a pro. The majority of my winning was done on single-play strategy, $1 thru $100 machines.
--262 of them were my Single-Play Strategy (SPS). I won 217 and lost 45. The average amount won per winning session was $4875; the average amount lost per losing session was $3400. Total net profit = ~$904k.
--165 were a mix between my self-developed RTT, ARTT, Multi-Strike, and 5-play strategies. These all were smaller stakes than SPS, and most began at quarters.
--Of the 165, I won ~80% of those and had an overall net profit of ~$80,000.
Now let's clear up more of the confusion that arises out of anti-Singer rhetoric:
1. SPS is FAR more complex and difficult to play than optimal-strategy. You must first master optimal-play for multiple games, you have to understand where and when to make the special plays, you have to have the determination to do EXACTLY what you said you were going to do as you sat down to play along with the discipline to STOP playing when the win or loss goal is met, and you have to be able to keep cumulative track of where you are in your play vs. where you need to be to quit. That's why there is no speed requirement when playing SPS.
2. I'm retired from professional play. I retired because I hit age 60, just like I said I would when I began this career. Critics like to say if I were winning at this rate I'd be playing....when it looks to be easy money to them. Well, as difficult as it is for AP's who can't stop playing and can't stop losing, I simply do not need the money from playing.
3. As tough as it is for vp players to comprehend doing, SPS requires players to disassociate themselves from their players cards. Yes I used them most of the time when I played, and of course I received a ton of freebies over the years. But NONE of it ever got figured into my net profit from playing the machines.
4. The notion that I "con" players is an AP lie, born out of envy over my success. I've trained hundreds of people at the machines over the years with either their or my money, and one time only have I used my player's card while they played - which was earlier this year in Laughlin. The AP rumor that I've done it somewhere else before is just another lie started by another RS critic.
5. It is my belief, from talking to game-manufacturer engineers and thru my own testing of machines both in the casinos and in my home, that the machines are not 100% random. Period. And while I actually developed my play strategies on the premise that they are indeed random because there simply was no other way to baseline my approach, I know they are not. However, I have not been able to determine whether it hurts or helps the player. But to blindly believe that the machines are as random as the concept of the world's most perfect RNG would suggest and to hide behind state Regs without wanting to understand that what the public has access to is purposely incomplete, is the position of a fool.
