Jacks or Better Strategy

Playing at the Sahara in 1994, I studied Stanford Wong’s Professional casino and memorized the strategy. However, Wong’s strategy was for 8/5 Jacks or Better with a 12,000-coin royal flush (from a progressive meter) and I was using it on 9/6 Jacks or Better games with lower royals. Furthermore, Wong’s belief at the time was that speed at this game was more important than complete accuracy; so his strategy was simplified. For example, all suited high card-ten combinations were grouped together, so I had no idea that JT was superior to QT, which was superior to KT. Similarly, Wong put all combinations of two unsuited high cards together and ranked below high card-ten (that is, from Queen H, Jack S,TS hold JT) so I had no idea that AK, AQ, and AJ were actually lower in value than KQ and KJ, which were both lower in value than QJ.

The game I began with was 9/6 Jacks or Better at the Sahara. It required four quarters to play and the royal paid $1,000. A 4-coin game paying a $1,000 royal is equivalent to a 5-coin game paying $1,250 (a “5,000-coin” royal flush) without the tax forms. (There were also a couple of 4-coin 8/5 Bonus casino spel games, but they paid less, so I didn’t attack them first.) The 9/6 game returned slightly over 100%, but the Sahara held promotions that made it worthwhile. Before I could modify the strategies to handle the promotions, however, I needed to learn the basics of this game.

My stance on strategy simplification was (and is) different from Wong’s. I had more time than money. I had the ability to figure things out. I had a new computer (my first personal computer ever) and both of Wong’s casino programs. I figured that, for me, accuracy was more important than speed. The goal was to prosper in these games and build a bankroll. I figured I couldn’t do that unless I stressed accuracy over all.I’d also picked up Dan Paymar’s 8th edition of casino Precision Play. His Jacks or Better strategy was an eye-opener. It was considerably more complex than Wong’s, but, as I learned as I went along, full of mistakes. Still, it gave me added insight.

In a footnote in one of Paymar’s appendices, he’d written that you should hold a suited high card- 10 over two unsuited high cards unless there was another card suited with the high card-ten. By now I knew that you had to look at all five cards to make the proper playing decision, rather than merely compare two combinations. I had been grouping cards into categories (high pairs, three-card straight flushes with no high cards and one gap, etc.) without realizing that the value of those groupings wasn’t fixed. Paymar taught me that the play of AH, Queen S, TS, 9H, 4C was different from AH, Queen S, TS, 9H, 4S though he hadn’t taught me why. (I later figured out the easy-to-overlook fact that the value of Queen S, TS was higher if there were still 11 spades in the deck than if there were only 10.) As it turns out, Paymar’s rule was wrong more often than it was right, but this was my first glimpse into the effect of “penalty cards.”

Even with this insight, my strategy never got to be completely accurate. But it was close. And I was working on four games at once. On Thursdays, the Sahara paid double for royal flushes hit in the first 10 minutes of any hour. On Sundays, it was double pay for four aces. With four aces doubled, Ginnie (she hadn’t left yet) and I switched to the 4-coin 8/5 Bonus casino machines where aces paid an extra $80 compared to an extra $25 on the 9/6 Jacks game.

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