Review of A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild

Title:

A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild

Author:

Bob Dancer and Liam W. Daily

Publisher:

Compton Dancer Consulting Inc.

Date:

2003

ISBN:

0-9727592-2-0

Pages:

104

Price:

$16.50

Reviewed by Nick Christenson, npc@lvrevealed.com

October 29, 2004

Video Poker is one of the few games where the well-informed gambler can achieve a regular edge over the house. There exist a few parts of the world where the idea of a "video poker professional", or at least an advantage VP player, can be a reality. Of the games that may be successfully beaten, Deuces Wild with the "full pay" pay table is probably the most well-known. In A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild, Bob Dancer and Liam Daily attempt to provide the ultimate guide to Deuces Wild video poker.

Bob Dancer is extremely well known in video poker circles. He's the author of numerous periodical articles about advantage play focusing on the game of video poker. He also has been involved in the creation of the excellent Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker video poker software. It would be difficult to imagine authors more qualified to write about advantage video poker than Dancer and Daily.

The book begins with background information that it is important to understand about video poker. This introduction is pretty well written. In chapter 2 and 3, Dancer and Daily provide a fairly easy to learn "beginner strategy" and a slightly more advanced "recreational strategy". These strategies give up some detail in order to achieve simplicity. With full pay deuces wild, players using the basic strategy should expect to be playing about break-even in the long run with the house. Someone who plays the recreational strategy accurately should expect to have a long run advantage over the casino.

Next the authors provide an introduction to the more complex strategies, which they call "basic" and "advanced". These strategies are recommended for those who are really serious about the game. The "advanced" strategy is basically a list of exceptions to the "basic" strategy, taking into consideration "penalty cards" and other special situations. The strategies presented in this book don't exactly equate to Dancer's video poker strategy cards that are widely available, but the correspondence is pretty close. Variations to the "advanced" strategy are discussed for the pay table the authors call "pseudo Full Pay".

For those interested in really learning this game, A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild is a valuable reference and I definitely recommend this book to serious VP enthusiasts. At the same time I don't believe that absolutely every Deuces Wild player needs it. My recommendation to potential readers would be to learn a simplified strategy from one of the many strategy cards or a book such as Paymar's Video Poker--Optimum Play. Then I'd recommend getting some good video poker software and practicing a great deal. My current favorite VP software is Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker, but there are others that are good as well. The software will point out some places where the strategy cards don't reveal the exact optimum strategy. A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild will explain this discrepancies for you, as well as provide some useful mnemonics for remembering a more general strategy. If this sounds valuable, by all means get this book.

Capsule:

A Winner's Guide to Full Pay Deuces Wild is an extraordinarily detailed book about one of the most profitable forms of video poker. This is a book that can walk a player from a novice through the most advanced and complicated plays. I believe there are books and tools for video poker that are likely to be better first books and are better overall for recreational players, but someone who is really serious about Full Pay Deuces Wild will almost certainly benefit a great deal from Dancer and Daily's book. I expect that serious VP players will want this book, as well as others in the authors' "Winner's Guide" series.