VIDEO POKER

Planning To Play A Promotion --- Part II of II

Do you HAVE to do the homework? No, of course not. There's no report card and no one will ever know whether you did it or not. However, if you aspire to be a winning video poker player, correctly analyzing promotions is part of the required skill-set. The only way to learn to work these things out is to get in there and do it. Reading my answer this week without working it through yourself first will teach you a little. Struggling with "how would I do it if I didn't have Dancer's answer" first and then comparing your technique with mine will teach you a LOT.

So, how much does this promotion add? I indicated how I added 100 for ALL natural quads. When you click on "analyze" and then "game", you'll find that this game returns 102.87% --- an increase of 3.14% over the 99.73% that base NSU returns. This increase is for all twelve quads other than deuces being card of the day. Since only one is card of the day at a time, we divide 3.14% by 12 and come up with 0.26% as the increase. 99.73% + 0.26% = 99.99% before slot club benefits are added. But there are other hands that change in strategy (such as a card-of-the-day pair being preferred to all 3-card straight flushes) that you need to identify and master before you can earn this percentage.

The second homework assignment was to consider how the 5-of-a-kind hand 55552 being paid an extra 100 coins would affect the play of 55669. Looking at the hand on WinPoker we see there are 20 separate ways that 5-of-a-kinds can be obtained by drawing three cards to 55. (For simplicity, let's assume that we are holding the two black fives.) Let's identify these 20 3-card draws: 5d5h2c, 5d5h2d, 5d5h2h, 5d5h2s, 5d2c2d, 5d2c2h, 5d2c2s, 5d2d2h, 5d2d2s, 5d2h2s, 5h2c2d, 5h2c2h, 5h2c2s, 5h2d2h, 5h2d2s, 5h2h2s, 2c2d2h, 2c2d2s, 2c2h2s, and 2d2h2s. This was an easy list to create once you've done it a time or two. If you didn't know why WinPoker said there were 20 times that 55 turned into 5-of-a-kinds, I suggest you spend time with this list until you are sure that there are no duplicates and all bases are covered.

Of these 20 possible cases, only the first four of them qualify for the 100-coin bonus. Four cases out of 20 is the same ratio as 1 out of 5, which is the same as 20 out of 100. If one fifth of the qualifying 5-of-a-kinds earn 100 coins, that's the same in the long run as all of them earning 20 coins each. For this reason, I add 20 coins to the value of 5-of-a-kinds, changing 80 to 100 on WinPoker.

Going back to the hand 55669, I see that holding 55 is now worth 3.02¢. That's a 4-cent improvement over 55552 not receiving the bonus, but holding two pair is still worth $3.40, so that's still the best play.

Adding 20 to the 5-of-a-kinds is only the correct number when you draw three cards. For a hand like 55567, where you'll draw two cards, adding 40 is appropriate because four out of the 10 times you end up with a 5-of-a-kind consists of the case 5 and one of the four deuces.

For additional practice, I suggest you examine the hand 55529 and determine whether it make sense to hold 555 rather than 5552 under both sets of rules. That is, 5555 (including 55552) returns an extra 100 coins and 5555 (but not including 55552) returns that extra 100 coins.

Many people try to answer these questions by guessing. I advise against that if possible. Although the math presented here is fairly simple for those good at solving puzzles, it will be beyond the skills of many players. If the math is too tough, then some sort of educated guessing may well be your best option.