A friend of mine recently returned from Las Vegas where he was surprised to discover many, many All American Poker games were sitting idle. That's somewhat understandable, since there are a lot of full-pay Deuces Wild games there and All American is viewed as being much, much harder to play. But these games have similar long-term returns ( 100.76% for 15/9/5 Deuces and 100.72% for All American) and even similar "risk" as measured by variance: 25.83 for Deuces and 26.80 for All American. But, it's easier to learn the proper playing strategy for Deuces, so that's the game of choice for pros and savvy 'recreational' players in Las Vegas. In fact, that's why my friend went there, to play Deuces. But there's nary a full-pay Deuces game to be found outside Las Vegas, yet All American is at least available in many areas, if not plentiful. Here in my home base of St. Louis, MO, All American is available in nickel, quarter and dollar formats; it's also in Tunica, Kansas City and, as I mentioned before, in Las Vegas. But it's not very popular because most people lose at the game and that's due, of course, to the fact that they play it incorrectly. Since All American is a variation of Jacks or Better, most people approach it with a similar strategy and that's a gigantic mistake. We know this by performing a rather simple calculation which you should know.

You are hopefully aware that the frequency of the hands received at a Video Poker are a result of the strategy used to play them. Both Jacks or Better and All American are dealt from a 52-card deck, so the starting hands are identical; the difference lies in what we do with those starting hands. For example, in a 9/6 Jacks or Better game, we expect to get a Flush once every 90 hands or so (1.10% of the time) if we play the game properly. In All American poker, we expect to get a Flush once every 64 hands (1.57%). In the case of All American, we spend a lot of time drawing for Straight Flushes (it pays 1000 versus 250 on the Jacks game), so some of them end up as regular flushes. But the biggest return comes from the payout for the 'regular' Flush, which is 6 (per coin played) in the Jacks game and 8 in the All American version. So, it ends up that Flushes make up 6.61% of the return of a Jacks game and 12.58% of the return of the All American game. Play All Am (okay if I call it this?) with a Jacks strategy and flushes return 1.10% X 8 = 8.80%, a loss of return of nearly 4%! That's made up with other hands a bit, but the net result is a return of about 97.5% if you play All Am with a 9/6 Jacks strategy. So you're really left with only two choices: learn the proper strategy or don't play the game. Well, actually three choices, I suppose. You may also choose to lose, because that's what'll happen if you don't learn the proper strategy.

As always, your ol' pal the GameMaster is here to help. Knowing that dollar All Am was going to be installed at one of my local, friendly casinos, I wanted to get my game in shape. I have played All Am on and off over the years, but once I 'graduated' to dollar play, I concentrated on Jacks and Double Bonus games. Well, All Am is better than both of those by a long shot, so I knew I needed to concentrate on that. But, as I showed you with the example on Flushes, All Am can be tough on the bankroll if it's not played properly. To be honest, I dreaded having to learn this strategy; one that I called a "mind-bender" in a previous article. But, if I did, I knew I'd have a great chance to earn some serious $$$. At a rate of 700 hands an hour in a dollar machine, along with a 0.25% slot club, the game can earn the skilled player over $30 an hour. Most experts would agree that the idea of playing accurate All Am at a rate of 700 hands per hour is virtually impossible. And, up until about 3 weeks ago, I would have agreed. I always thought the upper limit was about 500 hands an hour, but now I know it's closer to 800. Now understand that I'd much prefer that you play slowly and accurately, rather than to sacrifice your tiny edge over the house by playing more quickly and making more mistakes in the process, but I think you can have both speed and accuracy. That's what this series will do. It will show you how I got my playing speed up to over 700 hands per hour with an accuracy rating of 99.90% (as measured by total return).

You're eager to get started; so am I, so let's just plunge in and I'll work in the tools I used, my practice methods and so forth as we go along. First, if you're not familiar with the All American game, a pay schedule for it can be found in my "Pick a Game" series, Part 1, which is archived at the bottom of this page. Most often, All Am is found on the Bally "Game Maker" machine as one of the choices, but, regardless of what it's called, the pay schedule is what makes it. Here in St. Louis, All Am is available (as this was written) at Players Island in quarter and dollar formats, at Harrah's in quarter format and at the President Casino on the Admiral in nickels. Check our "Gaming in St. Louis" section for updates on that. Ready? Let's go.

The Concept

To play All American quickly, you have to memorize the playing strategy; there's no other way. But, if you take a look at one (I use a strategy generated by TomSki's marvelous program, "Video Poker Strategy Master" with some modifications), you'll quickly see that it's a daunting task. Yet, I did it. And then I began to wonder how I did it. It finally came to me: what I had done was to break down the hands by category. In the original strategy chart, the hands are arranged in a hierarchy of importance; a "4 ST, open, 0 high cards" appears just above "JT9s". What this means is that 2h ,8s ,9d,10d, Jd is properly played by holding the 4-card Straight, rather than the 3-card Straight Flush. Now, you can play All Am by looking at your copy of the strategy chart and finding the best option, but that slows you down. Don't get me wrong, my strategy sheet is right there with me every time I play, but I no longer have to look at it very much; that's just training. Where I got my speed increase was in realizing that there were certain hands that I'd never (or seldom) question and I learned to play them quickly. As an extreme example, if you were dealt a Royal Flush, you'd know EXACTLY how to play it, wouldn't you? The same is true if you were dealt a Straight Flush like this 4s,5s,6s,7s,8s. It cannot be improved, so you'd just hold it and smile. But, what if you were dealt this: 9c,10c,Jc,Qc,Kc? Hold it or go for the Royal? That's what the sheet is for; check it out. The answer is that you'd hold it, but it's immaterial in this discussion. What's important here is to understand that there are some hands which are "automatic" in that they have no or few alternatives. Yes, I know that you're not going to be dealt a bunch of "pat" or "made" hands, but there are a bunch of "automatic" hands which occur quite frequently. What I realized I did was to categorize these hands in three ways: hands with all 'low' cards (2-10), those with all 'high' cards (J-A) and those which were 'mixed' with a combination of high and low cards. I then learned the "automatic" hands for each category which allowed me to play quickly and that's what I'll teach you here.

This is already quite a bit longer than I intended it to be (according to all the 'pundits', 600 words is the ideal size for an Internet article; we're over twice that now), but I want to tell you that my speed increases came about because I practiced a lot. I use "Bob Dancer presents WinPoker" (BDPWP) by Dean Zamzow. You can download a trial version at http//www.zamzone.com/ and I urge you to do so if you don't already have this program. You'll also find more information on TomSki's "Video Poker Strategy Master" at that site. Practice at home is important, because BDPWP can be set up to not only track your errors, but also store the most recent 100 which can be called up in special training sessions. My words of praise for this program would fill another page here, so I won't even try.

Okay, so here's how we'll do it. In the next installment, I'll cover hands with all low cards; the one after that will cover hands with all high cards and we'll wrap it up with mixed hands. But you have enough information at this point to get ahead of me and that's just fine; my interest is in making you a winner at All American Poker.

See you here next time.