I find it instructive to watch Shirley play Suduku (also spelled Sudoku) puzzles. This is not a normal hobby of hers and the only time she really tries it is when she is on an airline flight, bored, and is thumbing through the in-flight magazine and finds one.

As most of you know, Suduku is a 27x27 square puzzle, made up of nine individual 9x9 squares. The object is to get the numbers one through nine once per each of the 27 lines, each of the 27 rows, and in each of the 9x9 boxes. They can be easy or hard for a variety of reasons, but the main determinant is how many boxes are filled in for you ahead of time. If you take a really tough puzzle and fill in four or five boxes at random, it sometimes becomes rather simple. (It can remain difficult, depending on which boxes are filled in.)

Although she's asked for and received some instruction on this game from time to time over the years, she is basically a novice without good techniques in solving these puzzles. She is also impatient, so if the solution doesn't come to her fairly quickly, she'll flip to the answer page and copy down three numbers. If that doesn't help sufficiently, she'll go back to the answers and get another three numbers. Eventually, one way or the other, she completes the puzzle.

Sometimes she won't even take the time to look at the answers. She'll have a particular square narrowed down to a four or a seven and she'll arbitrarily pick one of them and proceed from there. Sometimes this works, but when it's wrong, it's really wrong. Suduku is a game where you need to use already-filled-in squares to give you clues about the not-filled-in-yet squares. Early mistakes get multiplied as you go through the puzzle until eventually you end up in a corner and have no idea how to fix the problem.

Since this is purely recreation for Shirley, however she does it is "no big deal." She's enjoying herself, or getting frustrated, or both, but basically she's killing time until the plane lands and we go on to do whatever it is we're planning to do when we get there. How many Suduku mistakes she made on the flight is of no importance to anyone and is soon forgotten.

The reason this is instructive is I've watched players play video poker more or less the way Shirley plays Suduku. They're looking at video poker as a form of amusement. They don't know how to play (sometimes they know this and sometimes they don't) and they regularly make guesses at what seems right. Sometimes they look at a strategy card and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have a strategy card but they don't know how to read it.

The difference between Shirley playing Suduku and these people playing video poker is that it is essentially costless for Shirley to work on the puzzle. Playing video poker without a clue can be very expensive.

If you're enjoying yourself playing video poker this way and it's well within your recreational budget, by all means keep at it. Players that want to win need players like you to support the casino so the casino can afford to support us.

But even recreational video poker players prefer winning to losing. It doesn't take too much study to at least learn the basics of the games, including, most importantly, which pay schedules to avoid because they give you no realistic chance of winning.
             
While I don't care how well Shirley plays Suduku, I care a lot how she plays video poker. Although she essentially has unlimited access to our check book and credit cards, throwing money away isn’t within the acceptable parameters for either one of us.

For health reasons, Shirley has mostly stayed out of casinos for more than a year and so has forgotten much of what she knew about video poker strategy. Even if we decided now that a casino was smoke-free enough for her to play, I'll have to sit by her and check out her play on every hand. While this is a little tedious for both of us, we both believe her video poker results are much more important than her Suduku results.

Bob Dancer is America's best-known video poker writer and teacher. He has a variety of "how to play better video poker" products, including the software "Video Poker for Winners," Winner's Guides, strategy cards, his autobiography Million Dollar Video Poker, and his two novels, including Sex, Lies, and Video Poker. Dancer's products may be ordered at www.bobdancer.com or by telephone at 1-800-244-2224 M-F 9-5 Pacific Time.