Because most of our readers are "recreational" players and not full-time professionals, I thought it would be interesting to run a series of simulations on various Video Poker games to give you an idea of what may happen in a relatively small amount of play.

For each game covered, I ran 50 simulations of 7200 hands each with the idea that this might represent a year's worth of play for someone who plays eight to fourteen hours each week. If you play at a rate of 600 hands per hour, then this works out to be twelve hours of time on the machine, so one simulation may represent the total play on a weekend visit to Las Vegas, Biloxi, Atlantic City, etc.

Obviously, 50 simulations represent 360,000 hands of play and, if you are betting five quarters at a time, it amounts to $450,000 of total bets. If you're a dollar player, this would be an astonishing $1,800,000 of "action" which should qualify you for a lot of good comps at all but the stingiest of casinos.

As you'll see, a lot can happen to your bankroll in 7200 hands of play. Wild swings can and do occur but knowing that helps, I think, especially if you have any doubts about the "randomness" of a machine, be it in a brick-and-mortar casino, or in a cyber-casino.

All of these simulations were run in the Autoplay mode of WinPoker, version 6.0. The program does not keep track of the highs and lows reached during a simulation, so I had to "eyeball" that as it was running. But, for our purposes here, I believe the accuracy achieved is adequate. All I basically did was to run one 7200-hand simulation after another, record the highs, lows and final result and then compile them into the table you'll see below. I then extracted certain averages, streaks, etc. which I though might be helpful.

Several points to remember about these sims: First, WinPoker plays each hand 'perfectly' and we humans probably don't, so the results here are undoubtedly better than the average player will receive. Secondly, a total simulation of 360,000 hands at any Video Poker game is nowhere near "the long run". It's actually about 10% of "the long run" so it will be surprising to find that the total return for a simulation matches that of the paytable for the game covered.

But, all-in-all, I think these sims have considerable practical use because they represent what may happen to any of us in a given number of hands at our favorite Video Poker game. Just remember: your mileage may vary.

This series will eventually cover the majority of all Video Poker games out there, such as Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild, Joker Poker, etc. which means this may go on for a long time. We'll cover "full-pay" versions, games with progressives and weird variations, if possible, so if there's a game which interests you, please e-mail me at aceten@stlnet.com and I'll try to do a sim on it.