Internet Advantage Play: Video Poker

The GameMaster's Secrets:
Internet Advantage Play: Video Poker - Part 3

What I want to talk about this time is my experience playing a Video Poker game called "All Aces", which is available at Royal Vegas Casino, one of our fine advertisers here, as well as at other Microgaming-powered casinos. It's a "bonus" type of game that has a payout of 2000 for 5 when one hits Four Aces. No, you do not need a special kicker to get that payout like in Double, Double Bonus - the 2000 mini-jackpot in All Aces comes from any hand of quad Aces and that is sweet. When you run through the math, it works out that you get paid half a Royal on a hand that will occur, on average almost 10 times more frequently! Of course, the casino isn't giving $$$ away here, but the long-term pay back for perfect play is 99.92%, which can be close to break-even if you figure in bonuses and/or "slot club" cash rebates.

So, what's the catch? Naturally, there is one; after all, casinos aren't in business to lose, but in this case it's not as bad as you may think. The culprit here is variance - high variance to be specific. What this means is that it takes a comparatively much larger bankroll to attack this game than a game like 9/7/5 Double Bonus Poker, for example. I chose 9/7/5 Double Bonus because it can be found at some Internet casinos as well as many land-based casinos, but "full-pay" DB is not available on the 'Net, to the best of my knowledge. Be that as it may, the variance for All Aces is 65.23 and for 9/7/5 DB, it's 28.54. Contrast those to a game like 9/6 Jacks where the variance is 19.51 and you can see the problem.

What those numbers boil down to is this: If you try playing the $1 All Aces VP game until you hit four Aces with a bankroll of less than 1500 bets or so ($7500 for the dollar game), it's not a matter of if you will lose, just a matter of when. And I'm sure that's what the casino's "banking" on (pun absolutely intended): players giving it a shot with $300 or $400, which means the vast majority will lose. However, if you'll finance the venture appropriately, your probability of hitting the quad Aces improve quite a bit. An analysis of the game by that fabulous program that I always recommend every VP player should own - Bob Dancer presents WinPoker - shows that the four Aces add 9.50% to the total return of 99.92%. The Royal adds 2.05% and the Straight Flush adds 0.62%, which means you can expect to get a return of about 87.75% until such time when you hit one of those rare hands.

That's a 12.25% house edge you're bucking here, at least in the short-term, which means your expected loss in say, 8500 hands of play, at a dollar game where the bet is $5 per hand ($42,500 in total bets) is $5207. And, while it's reasonable to assume you'll hit the four Aces at least once in that 8000 hands of play, there are no guarantees. I'll spare us both the math (use the binomdist function of MSExcel if you want the exact figure), but if a "cycle" of quad Aces is 4210 hands, then there's a 13% probability of not hitting them after two cycles of play; roughly 8500 hands. That tells me the dollar machine is just too risky for most of us.

The good news is that this machine is also available in $.25 and $.50 versions. I played the 50-cent game and committed $4000 or 1600 bets to the effort. Hey, a thousand bucks for hitting quad Aces sounds good to me! Well, as luck would have it, I did hit them early on - probably in about 3000 hands of play - so I decided to "take a shot" and play the $1 version - at least until my account balance fell back to my original $4000 starting point. Well, on Sunday, July 9th I hit a Royal for $4000 which put me way ahead of the curve of this break-even game, but as I wrote in my article "Coin Flips and Video Poker", which is in the Secrets archive here, once you get ahead you might well stay ahead in a situation like this, even though the mathematical expectation is to eventually win nothing. The key word here is "eventually", which might mean 2000 hands from now or 1 million hands from now. I have no way of knowing when my profit at this game will disappear, but at least by keeping good records, I'll know when it actually happens. For now I've got their $$$ and am making good use of them.

Here are some statistics that might help you decide whether or not to play this game:

Expectation for 8000 hands of play (16-20 hours) at a $.50 machine: $16.00 loss.

One Standard Deviation for 8000 hands of play (16-20 hours) at a $.50 machine: $1806.10.

What this means is that the mathematical expectation is to lose $16 at a 50-cent machine when playing 8000 hands, however your actual results will be somewhere between a loss of $1822 and a gain of $1790, about 68% of the time. Roughly 95% of the times you play 8000 hands, your results will fall somewhere between a loss of $3630 and a gain of $3595. Double these numbers for a dollar game and cut them in half for a quarter game.

The Proper Playing Strategy

This game somewhat resembles Double Bonus Poker, but the proper playing strategy for All Aces is actually quite a bit simpler. Because the Flush pays only 25 for 5, there are very few Flush draws (like the Ah-Jh-3h you might hold in DB Poker), but many, many more draws to a single Ace. For example, the optimum play when dealt Qh, Jc, 9c, 8h, As is to hold just the Ace of spades, rather than go for the inside Straight. In fact, the only time you should hold two other "high" cards (J, Q, K) in preference to an Ace is when those two cards are suited. And this is what makes the variance so high - at least when you hold two high cards, you might pair one or the other and get your bet back. In this game, going for the Aces is more profitable, so you're trading the "push" offered by a pair of Jacks or better for the possibility of hitting the quad Aces. In fact, a pair of Aces outranks every hand except an open-ended 4-card Straight Flush, a "made" (dealt) Straight, Trips, Flush, Full House and a 4-card Royal. Just like Double Bonus Poker, a made Full House with three Aces is broken up in order to draw to the three Aces, but many other plays are unfamiliar, at best.

If you don't have a strategy card for this game, you can email me and I'll send you one. Please put All Aces Strategy in the subject heading so I know it's not spam and I'll send a copy of the chart I use to you by return email.

I'll see you here next time.

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The GameMaster's Secrets:
Internet Advantage Play: Video Poker - Part 3

The All Aces Pay Schedule (5 coins played)

The Proper Playing Strategy

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The GameMaster's Secrets: Internet Advantage Play: Video Poker - Part 3