Page 12 - Jackpot Magazine Tunica ~ July, 2026

PLAY TO WIN
Strategy is important, but dumb luck helps
“A gambler never makes the same mistake twice. It’s usually three or more
times.”
Father’s Day was last month, and many of us spent time remembering our dads and the fun we had with them. Regular readers of this column know that my dad loved casinos, especially playing blackjack and video poker. He wasn’t a slot player, and he never played craps or baccarat. But, boy, did he play blackjack and video poker.
He had a few theories about the games, especially blackjack. Some of his ideas were not quite right, but they were right to him, and he stuck with his playing style. That meant I
did not want to play at the same table with him for fear of messing with his mojo. But I did enjoy playing video poker at a machine next to him or nearby.
When one of us hit big (and
big, of course, was relative to
how we had been doing that
day), we would cheerfully say,
“Yippee skippee!” That was our code for a full house or better. We generally played Double Double Bonus Poker, my dad’s game of choice. That meant it became my game, too.
Double Double has some playing nuances that differ from the more popular Jacks or Better, so there was an initial learning curve. Fortunately, all the information about the game, including the payouts for various winning hands and bet amounts, can be found by pressing the Game Info button.
Of course, doing this might not give you all the information you need, as Henry Tamburin, gaming expert and author of many best-selling books on gambling, including Blackjack: Take the Money and Run, found out.
Tamburin once
talked about the
dumb luck he had
playing a game he
had never seen before
while on a casino outing with his father- in-law. In a past column in Jackpot!, Tamburin shared how he switched to a new machine and saw the main screen was not what he was used to. He hit the buttons and... well, I’ll let him explain.
As Tamburin told it: “I’ve had some wild experiences in casinos throughout my 30-plus years of gambling but nothing like what happened to me recently. Here’s the true story. My father-in-law and I were playing video poker on two adjacent machines. He was steadily winning and I was steadily
losing.
“I don’t normally change
video poker machines when I’m losing. But for some unknown reason I got the urge to move to the machine to my right. It was
similar to the machine that my father-in-law and I were playing (multi-game, multi-
denomination machine) so I hit the cash out button on my machine, grabbed my payout ticket, moved one seat over and inserted the ticket and my players card into the new machine.
“The credits registered just like they were supposed to. But on my display screen was a game I had never seen before. It wasn’t a video poker or a slot game. The screen showed a lot of vertical numbers. For a moment I thought it was an electronic keno game but it didn’t look like any electronic keno game I was familiar with. No sweat, I thought, I’ll just touch the More Games button and it will take me to the main screen where I can select the video poker game that I was anxious to play.
“I touched the More Games
button but nothing happened. Something seemed to be amiss because normally when you touch this
button it returns you to main screen.
“I noticed the Game Info button, so I touched it and again nothing happened. Now I was getting angry so I started touching both buttons back and forth when all of a sudden, to my surprise the
game started to play.
“I watched in shock as different
numbers lit up on my screen of this unknown game. I certainly didn’t want to play this game that I knew nothing about but, dang, here I was unknowingly playing it. Now I was starting to get upset with myself because I didn’t have a clue how much I bet on this game.
“Then suddenly the numbers stopped lighting up and music started to play. I stared at the screen wondering what was going on when the word Jackpot appeared in large letters at the top of my screen. I was in a state of shock!
“I finally turned to my father-in-law and said, ‘You are not going to believe this, but I just hit a jackpot on a game that I know nothing about.’ He thought I was joking but within a few seconds $4,200 in big numbers appeared on the screen. I had just somehow hit a $4,200 jackpot on a game that I had no idea what it was or how to play it.
“It turned out I was unintentionally playing a 25-cent multi-keno game and I must have accidentally touched the play button when I was trying to go back to the main screen.”
So, what’s the moral to this story, Tamburin asked? He is a firm believer that to be a smart player you’ve got to play the games that offer the best odds with sound playing strategies and understand what you are playing. But, as his experience showed, sometimes a little bit of dumb luck helps.
Play To Win Again
The Best of... Series
~ Terrence ‘V.P. Pappy’ Murphy, freelance writer
12 JACKPOT! MAGAZINE • July 2026
THE SOUTH’S LARGEST GUIDE TO GAMING & FUN • www.jackpotmagazine.com