Originally Posted by Alan Mendelson View Post
Im really surprised. All of the books Ive read early on suggested low variance games such as Jacks or Better to give you a better shot at winning. After all with 9/6 JOB the house edge is extremely low. With some DW games the player even has the edge. Now you're telling me that I should have started on high variance games such as Royal Aces Bonus?
There's two factors at play. The variance and the ER. Assuming an equal ER then, in general, the higher the variance the better the chance of winning a session. However, comparing a 99.5% return game like JOB with a low return, high variance game you might actually do better with JOB.

For example, I just compared BP with Aces and Eights. They are almost identical variance but A/8 pays around 99.8% instead of 99.2%. That difference raises the session win percentage from 30->35%.

Also, there are extremes for variance that will change things. For example, a game that only pays on a RF would have an extremely high variance even though it could return 100%. However, since a RF only strategy yields a RF only 1 in around 24K hands you would only win 1 out of 6 sessions at most (4000 hand sessions).

What I'm giving you is basically a rule of thumb that applies to most VP games.