VIDEO POKER

Trying for a Sequential Royal

Sequential royal flushes are, in order, 'AKQJT' or 'TJQKA'. Assuming no special efforts are made to end up with a sequential, one of these puppies occurs for every 59 non-sequentials. Should one-way-only sequentials be called (i.e. either left-to-right or right-to-left, but not both), they only happen once every 120 royals. Not very often.

In a widely-distributed coupon book, in July and August, Silverton is offering a 4,000-coin bonus for sequential royals --- up to a maximum bonus of $4,000. This is such a rarely-collected bonus, if you didn't already think it was a good play to play at the Silverton, this would hardly be a major incentive. But if you were going to play there anyway, I thought it interesting to see how plays would change.

The highest-returning game there is NSU Deuces Wild, so that's the game I thought I'd examine. If you don't make any special effort for the sequential, the return increases from 99.728% to 99.759% - which most players would consider fairly negligible. If you make appropriate adjustments, it's worth a bit more. It's not worth too much effort to figure this out because the odds against collecting are rather prohibitive. Still, figuring out how to do it might pay off down the road.

Let's look at the one-card draws first. If four of the cards in the hand are 'AKQJ', you throw away EVERY possible fifth card except for a deuce. So we need to examine 'AKQJ' W, where the four royal cards are in sequential position. We use Video Poker for Winners and set the royal flush value to 8,000 coins. If we do, we'll see that holding the sequential four-to-the-royal is worth $181 for the 5-coin $1 player. This is clearly more than the $125 we'd get for holding all five cards, so this is one of those rare cases where we toss the deuce. And if we'd toss the deuce from 'AKQJ' W, we'd certainly also do it from W 'KQJT'. 'KQJT' by itself is clearly more valuable than any 4-card royal including an ace because of straight and straight flush opportunities.

Now let's look at the two-card draws, such as drawing two cards to 'QJT'. Our first problem is to figure out how much to assign to the royal flush. Drawing two cards to xx 'QJT' and ending up with a royal, we can end up with 'AKQJT' (worth $8,000) or 'KAQJT' (worth $4,000). Since these are equally likely possibilities, we need to assign a value of $6,000 to the royal flush.

Playing around with the possibilities, I determined that 'QJT' > 'QJT8' and 'KQT' > 'KQT9' (along with all other king-high 3-card royals), but 'QJT9' > 'QJT'. It turns out that 3-of-a-kinds are better than these 3-card royals, i.e. from TT 'QJT' we still hold TTT.

I didn't spend too much time on three-card draws, as connecting on a sequential royal from, say, 'JT' is a 1-in-97,290 chance. One set of cases I found were 'AK', 'AQ', 'AJ', and 'AT' with no flush penalties. If you've mastered the appendices of the Dancer/Daily "Winner's Guide to NSU Deuces Wild" there are LOTS of adjustments --- such as you hold 'KQ' from 'KQ4' J4 if the 'KQ' is sequential, but you draw five new cards if the king and queen aren't in sequential position. We're talking about fractions of a penny in EV here. I found no adjustments for either 4-card or 5-card draws, but I didn't look too hard.

Strangely enough, players who don't care two hoots about penalty cards will fall into some of these sequentials by inadvertently making the right play. From 4h Kc 3c Qh Tc, for example, players who don't care about penalty cards will go for 'KT', whereas stronger players will throw all of the cards away. When we have a bonus for sequentials, EVERYBODY will hold 'KT' on this hand.

If you play $2 NSU rather than $1-or-lower NSU, the rules change. Since the bonus is limited to $4,000, a sequential royal is worth $12,000 rather than $16,000. For the 1-card draws, then, we need to set the royal flush value at 6,000 coins. It turns out that we still break single-deuce sequential wild royals.

For 2-card draws in the $2 NSU games, I couldn't find any changes. That is, 'QJT8' > 'QJT' because we need to set the royal at 5,000 coins rather than 6,000 like we do for lower stakes.

If you're going for the watch (you get a free watch reputed to be worth $8,725 if you play $450,000 coin-in in either July or August --- NSU machines and certain other ones are excluded), the game of choice is probably 8/5 Bonus Poker. I could find no cases where you made strategy changes to this game because of the sequential royal bonus, but still you need to be on the lookout "just in case." If you get the sequential royal, don't expect the floor people to tell you to pull out your coupon. They might, but you're the one with primary responsibility.