VIDEO POKER
 Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column each week with Jeffrey Compton titled Player's Edge, which features information on promotions at various Las Vegas Hotel. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.
Aug 06, 2002
How Do I Know for Sure?
9/6 Jacks or Better is an easy game to master completely --- at least by video poker standards. There are very few penalty card situations, and the ones that do exist are not very difficult. The strategy I published in my 1997 report and the strategy in the 2000 strategy card co-written with Liam W. Daily (which had the identical strategy but presently much more clearly) are unchallenged for accuracy.
Strategies produced by other writers such as Skip Hughes and Dan Paymar are slightly different from mine. These authors don't challenge the accuracy of the strategy I publish. They argue that the gain realized by memorizing every last penalty card rule is not worth the effort required to do so. That's a discussion for another day. For now, let's just accept you can get a perfect 9/6 strategy if you want one.
Now let's discuss 8/6 Jacks --- which is found on a number of Triple Play machines. There are casinos where this 98.39% game is the best in the house, and there are situations where the slot club plus available promotions make the game playable.
So assume I knew 9/6 Jacks cold and wanted to work out the strategy for 8/6 Jacks. How would I do it? First of all, I know from experience that the exact value of the full house isn't that critical to strategy. (As an example, the 10/6 Jacks game available at the Stratosphere for quarters has EXACTLY the same perfect strategy as does 9/6 Jacks.)
Only full houses change value. No 3-or-more-card combination that doesn't contain a pair can possibly be affected. I check the very few close plays containing a pair (such as QJT99) and find none of those plays have changed. I am left with the conclusion that any possible change will come from when I hold two honor cards (the only time you hold two unpaired cards in Jacks or Better) or perhaps even a single high card.
I check the value of an example hand of QJ of hearts combined with 345 with spades. When I play for dollars, the QJ changes by 0.55¢ when the pay schedule changes by one unit for full houses. A moment's thinking about it tells me that EVERY two-card combination, suited or not, changes by .55¢.
I then set WinPoker to Jacks or Better. Going to "Options" and "Change Pay Schedule", I set up 8/6. I then click on "Training Modes", and then "Advanced" and then "Hard Hands" which I set to .006. While in "Training Modes", I also click on "Auto Hold".
That's a lot of clicking, but let's see what that does. When I click on "deal", I see a hand where the difference between the best and the second-best play is less than 0.6¢. There are very few hands, and they keep rotating.
For example, one very close play concerns a suited JT and an off-suit Q --- where holding QJ is better than JT by a very small amount. This is not a play that could change between 9/6 and 8/6 because the value of each 2-card combination changed by the same 0.55¢. So however much or little QJ is better than a suited JT in 9/6, it is better in the 8/6 game by exactly the same amount.
Another close play that shows up is a hand like a suited AKT5 with an off-suit T. On these hands, AKT5 is better than AKT by a small amount. But these hands cannot be affected by a change in the value of a full house, as you cannot have a full house in a hand that contains AKT.
Another play that shows up is a variation of a suited KT5 with an unsuited 9 and 3. The correct play in both 8/6 and 9/6 is just the K. It's a close play in each game, but it stays the same.
The ONLY hand that shows up where a 2-card combination is less than a more-than-two card combination is the hand AK8 with a suited QJ. In 8/6, WinPoker shows the correct play is AKQJ. I know from experience that QJ is the best play in 9/6.
These are the only four hands that show up in my search. I try it 200 times or so and continue to only get variations on these four hands, so I am confident that with this is the only difference between the two games.
I went over this discussion with somebody and they suggested it was easier to look on Tomski's Video Poker Strategy Master. This is a fine program that gives a good-but-not-perfect strategy for many games almost instantly. But when comes to deciding between a suited QJ and AKQJ, VPSM gives different strategies for 8/6 than 9/6. Unfortunately neither is correct. In addition, the output to this program is more than 80 lines for each game. Comparing two 80-line lists line by line to check for differences, and then checking them out using WinPoker because you cannot totally trust VPSM, is a LOT more cumbersome than the method I describe.
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