Originally Posted by
Alan Mendelson
Originally Posted by
a2a3dseddie
Maybe one of the math guys can chime in here. After 3 million hands at $1, $2, or $5 VP on a 98% machine, what is the probability you would be ahead $1 million dollars?
Why does it have to be one million dollars? How about being ahead $100?
The question is can you be ahead at a negative expectation game. It's not about being ahead by one million dollars.
If you are trying to make this about Singer's claims about being ahead one million dollars over ten years you'd have to know how many hands he played. We don't know.
But redietz provided a specific question: "play three million hands of negative EV video poker and be ahead lifetime"?
The three million wasn't meant as an estimate of Rob's play, but assigning a conservative minimum number of hands to Rob is pretty easy.
I think he claims to have played professionally for 10 years. If we lowball that to the eight years he was writing for Gaming Today, and say he played at least 20 hours a week as a professional, which is also lowballing it, and then say he played 50 weeks a year, that would be 8 X 20 X 50 = 8000 hours playing vp as a professional. This is a very conservative figure, as a professional may play quite a lot more per week, and this doesn't count the years Rob played before or after deciding he was a pro. But tossing all that aside, we have 8000 hours X 500 hands an hour (a reasonable, slightly lowball figure), which would tally up to somewhere around 4 million hands. Bear in mind, this includes just eight of the 25 years Rob has played video poker, so it may be a really low figure.
So Rob's claim to have won a million dollars should probably be figured in a context of his having played a minimum of 4 million hands of negative EV video poker. If my math seems way off in any regard, please let me know.
I'm not a math guy (although I played on the math department intramural basketball team at Penn State and stay at Holiday Inn Express), so I leave it to the math people to do the math, as they say, as to the likelihood of Rob doing what he's done.