I received a phone call from a lady, Pam, who years ago used to be a good friend, but we haven’t spoken in several years. Nothing happened to ruin the friendship — it’s just that she lives out of town and she plays at different casinos than I do when she returns to town.
“I think I was cheated by the South Point,” she told me.
“What happened?” I had serious doubts about the South Point cheating a player — but I suppose anything could happen.
She told me, “I was playing Double Pay Double Double Bonus Triple Play and was dealt aces with a kicker on all three lines. They only paid me for one of the lines on the deal, and then all three on the draw.”
Oh, wow. It’s been 20 years since I thought about that game variety. It was one of hundreds of special games devised by videopoker.com that are now sometimes relegated to units which have lots of different varieties of games — like Star Poker or All-Star Poker machines. It was going to take a bit for me to remember the specifics of this particular game.
As I recall, you are dealt and then paid for all three hands on the deal (which is a form of five card stud poker). The hand on the very bottom is then played like regular Triple Play. You hold cards from that hand if you like which are duplicated in the other hands, and cards are drawn from a separate deck for each of these three hands.
Pam maintained she was dealt aces with a kicker on all three of her initial hands.
I asked her what the kicker card was with her aces and she told me it was the three of diamonds and the same card was dealt in the middle of all three lines.
Doubtful. Being dealt aces with a kicker is a 1-in-216,000 hand event, approximately — and that’s not taking into account the order of the cards. To happen three times in a row, it’s 216,000 times 216,000 times 216,000. Since the five cards can be dealt in sixty different orders, it’s another 60 times 60 that the second and third dealt hands were in the precise same order.
Is it possible? Of course. But far more likely is that Pam held all five cards on the bottom hand as soon as she was dealt them — and simply forgot that she did that.
I asked her if the South Point personnel were the ones who figured out how much she was due or if it was the machine. She told me the machine came up with the number.
“Consider,” I told her. “This means that if you were cheated, which I don’t think you were, it was videopoker.com who would have been the cheater, not the individual casino. This game is more than 20 years old and every time it is played the machine calculates how much you earned. If there was a problem with the way it calculated, surely it would have been fixed by now.”
I asked her if this was something that just happened, or was it “a while ago.” Turned out it was some time earlier, and the thought that she had been cheated had been eating at her ever since.
“When it happened, you could have asked for a slot tech to review the hands that were dealt. Had the tech done this, you would know for sure if the hand was dealt on all three lines or just the bottom line. There’s a limit of how many hands back they can go, but they will show you if you ask.
“Even if too many hands have been played for a slot tech to review the hand, the hand was probably caught by the overhead eye-in-the-sky. It would require an effort to rewind the digital tape to look at the hand — and I’m not sure if they do that on request or not, but maybe they will if it’s still eating at you.
“I think, though, that whether you can see the hand again or not, you should try to rest easy about it. The fact is that it would be extremely unlikely for the same five cards in the same order to be dealt three times in a row AND the machine miscalculate how much the hand was worth. My best estimate is you were dealt a very nice hand, held all five cards quickly, and were paid correctly. Nobody cheated you.
“Congratulations!”
I’m not sure whether she stopped worrying about it or not.