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Dear Mark: Do you recommend playing on just one video poker machine or moving and playing on others, especially if a machine I am currently playing on is not paying off? Once when I moved, the next player who came and sat in the seat I had previously occupied immediately hit MY royal flush. Also, suppose I get lucky and do hit a royal flush. Should I stay on the same machine or move since the chances of hitting another one are nil? Frank G.

I’ll get to your answer momentarily, Frank, but first let’s blow reveille: You should always play on video poker machines with the best paytables, period!

As to your question, it really doesn’t make a difference. There's no way to determine when a machine will hit a royal flush. Yes, people like to see "hot" and "cold" streaks in video poker machines; but that is simply a characteristic of combining wishful thinking with machine randomness.

Also, Frank, hitting a royal flush does not make a machine any more or less likely to hit another, although your question does prompt me to recall a gentleman named Stevey Tyler, who hit three-$4000 royal flushes in a row at a Reno, NV supermarket. The bagger asked “Paper or plastic?” for hauling out the loot.

Many players like you erroneously believe that if they had stayed put and inserted just five more coins, or had pressed the play button on a coinless machine one more time, that royal -- that someone else fortuitously hit -- would have been theirs.

In reality, when a machine is sitting in idle mode, even for a split second, it will be constantly crunching numbers waiting for the next sucker -- Oops! sportsman, I meant -- to come along. When the next participant walks over and inserts a coin, the machine is triggered into knowing it has a live gambler on the hook.

When you feed a coin into the machine, the random number generator (RGN) instantaneously stops crunching numbers and picks the combination of cards you will see on the screen. From your moving to another machine, until the next player inserts their coins, the combination of hand possibilities played through is incalculable. Yet the chances of anybody hitting that royal remain forever the same, about one in 40,000, no matter what the machine had been doing moments ago.

I would recommend that you do move from one machine to another if the buttons are sticky, or if the lights are blinking, or you particularly don’t enjoy cigarette smoke, or to hide from your tapped out brother-in-law, or for anything else that annoys you.

Oh, by the way, the odds of Mr. Tyler hitting those three royals in a row were 32.8 trillion to one. He took paper.

Dear Mark: Do you know if there is any blackjack game that allows the player to have an edge against the house, using just basic strategy and not counting cards? Jerry C.

Basic strategy is nothing more than how you play your hand against the dealer’s “up card.” Playing correctly, Jerry, you can lower the casino advantage down to less than one percent, which incidentally, can be done at any casino that offers blackjack.

In the past, I have come across a few casinos that offer a blackjack game that is beatable using perfect basic strategy alone. You’ll need to find the following combination of rules to get this edge: Single deck, the dealer stands on soft 17, and doubling down is allowed after splitting.

Bear in mind, Jerry, scarce as this game is now, if you can ferret out a blackjack game with these rules, you will have a .1% advantage against the house, which for a $10 bettor, will give you an expected return of about 60¢ an hour with perfect play.

I highly recommend you don’t quit your day job.

Gambling Wisdom of the Week: "Playing the slots for any length of time is about as futile as tossing quarters into a wishing well and mumbling, "I wish I had money...I wish I had money." --Barry Meadow, "Blackjack Autumn"
By Mark Pilarski