I received a phone call from a very good friend — who isn’t a video poker expert. He’s the kind of person I’m willing to help basically an unlimited amount for free.
He asked about using the “user defined games” section of WinPoker to add Deuces Bonus Poker (DWB). He didn’t see any way to enter a game with wild cards using that feature.
“Well,” I told him, “You’re correct that you can’t enter such a game using user defined games, but fortunately the game is already included. If you’re looking for “Deuces Bonus” you won’t find it, but if you’re looking for “Bonus Deuces,” you will.”
Sure enough, he found it easily, and was embarrassed he couldn’t find it before he called me.
I asked him if he could share where he found a playable DWB game. I knew he wouldn’t be playing for small stakes, and he wouldn’t be playing if he didn’t think he had the advantage.
Sometimes players aren’t willing to share such information, figuring that more skilled players who know about a particular play will kill the game. Still, we do favors back and forth so maybe he’d share with me this time. (And maybe not. He’d still be my friend if he felt he couldn’t share this particular game.)
“It’s actually an Ultimate X (UX) game. I’m trying to run coin-in at a casino in case I can’t find enough slot plays there. It’s not a positive play by itself, but enough coin-in gets you good mailers. Playing that game exclusively would be too expensive of a way to earn the mailers, but if it only averaged 20% or so of your play (with the rest being slots), it would be a good filler.
“I know UX games are played differently than regular video poker,” he continued, “but I don’t know the DWB game at all and wanted to get a feeling for it.”
I told him he was going about it wrong. The strategy for UX DWB is much different from regular DWB — primarily because when you get a straight flush in UX DWB, you get a 12x multiplier on the next hand. So you play for straight flushes MUCH more often in the UX game than you do in the regular game.
I do not have a UX DWB strategy. If I felt I needed to play that game, I’d have to buy the strategy from somebody else — and I currently don’t have anyone I know who can make one — or use the VP PRO strategy analyzer on videopoker.com to figure it out.
The VP PRO strategy analyzer requires a monthly or annual fee to use. It allows you to get correction on several games that WinPoker doesn’t — and one of those games is UX.
You can play the game, get correction when you are wrong, and ask it the correct play for any hand with any “sum of multipliers (SOM).” It’s a lot of work to create a strategy using this tool, but it’s the best way to do it for those of us without access to advanced programming skills.
The difficulty with UX for any game is that the strategy changes for different SOMs. Consider the Triple Play version. Multipliers can range from 1x to 12x for each hand — meaning the SOM can range from 3x to 36x. There are hands you play the same for all SOM levels (like a dealt straight flush, for example) and there are hands that you play differently at low SOMs and high SOMs.
To cover all possibilities, you need to create 30+ strategies. Which is not a trivial feat. Five Play SOMs range from 5x to 60x, so that means 50+ strategies. For Ten Play you need a different approach because VP PRO doesn’t cover that game. It’s far too complicated.
When I played UX, I used a simplified strategy for each game — created by someone who I’m not in touch with anymore. It was complicated, but manageable. I don’t play the game anymore because the games I have the strategy for (like 9/6 Double Double Bonus UX Ten Play) do not exist anywhere that I know about.
I’m not sure my message was welcome news to my friend, but it kept him from wasting his time practicing something that wasn’t going to do him any good.