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Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column with Jeffrey Compton, "Player's Edge", featuring information on promotions at various Las Vegas casinos. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Neon section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.

For more details and a schedule of Bob's free classes, visit www.bobdancer.com.

Aug 19, 2008

Getting Around a Problem with Video Poker for Winners

As most of you know, I helped develop the "Video Poker for Winners" software. Previously I was associated with WinPoker, but since Dean Zamzow didn't appear interested in keeping that software upgraded, I felt I had to move on.

The overlap in what video poker computer products will do is considerable. They all do the "basic stuff" really well --- and the basic stuff is the most important. Each brand has features that the others don't. And each one has a spokesperson who trumpets the superiority of his/her product over the other. Since you expect it, let me tell you that I believe that VPW is best. (And we know in advance that [listed alphabetically] Linda Boyd, Dan Paymar, Jean Scott, and Jim Wolf would like you to know that they feel just as strongly about their respective products.) Now let's get on to other things.

None of the products is perfect and recently I discovered a problem with VPW. The way it was programmed, when you enter pay schedule numbers, the numbers must be whole integers, even at the one-coin level. This feature was added by one of our programmers and I didn't catch it until recently.

I discovered this when I tried to analyze Wheel Poker. Wheel Poker is a 6-coin game where for every 4-of-a-kind you get so spin a wheel which randomly gives you some bonus between 100 and 2,000 coins. While the wheel is random, not all of the spaces are equally likely. According to IGT, the average bonus is slightly more than 428 coins.

Since 8/5 Bonus Poker was the best game I could find on Wheel Poker, I tried to use VPW to analyze it. Therefore I added 428 to each of the 5-coin 4-of-a-kind returns, giving 553 for four 5s-Ks, 628 for four 2s-4s, and 828 for four aces.

VPW didn't like these 5-coin numbers because they were not divisible by five. So the software "rounded down" these numbers so that they became 550, 625, and 825. Although this isn't a disaster and this won't change things by much, I wanted to get it accurate if I could.

To get around this, I multiplied all the numbers by 10. That is, instead of a pay schedule of 4000, 250, 828, 628, 553, 40, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 (which is what I really wanted) I entered in 40000, 2500, 8280, 6280, 5530, 400, 250, 200, 150, 100, 50. Now the numbers are divisible by five and the ratio between the amounts should stay the same. This is like previously denominating the pay schedule in dollars and now I'm doing it in dimes.

The return came out as 1195.163%. When I did it on WinPoker (the regular way) the number came out 119.5163%. BINGO! The first number is EXACTLY ten times as big as the second --- which is what I hoped/expected to be the case. It's easy to shift the decimal point one position over so I come out with the same numbers. And if I do it in VPW rather than WinPoker, I also get the strategy (which WinPoker doesn't have but others do) and the exceptions to the strategy (which no other software has.)

I'm going to spend a few weeks talking about this game on this site, so if you don't know how to convert 119.5163% for six coins into a useful figure for five coins, make sure you come back next week. While I won't tell you where I'm playing the 8/5 Bonus Poker Wheel Poker game, I will provide you with enough information so that you can analyze any pay schedule and create your own strategy.