In video poker, I am interested in whether or not I am winning for the year. I care very little about whether I am winning today, and I care not at all about individual hands — unless that hand is something like K♠ Q♠ J♠ T♠ 5♣. That hand gets my blood pumping. Especially when I am playing multi-line games like Triple Play, Five Play, Ten Play, Fifty Play, or Hundred Play.
Several authors, myself included, have written that the strategy for playing the multi-line games is exactly the same as when playing the single-line games (assuming the same pay schedule.) We have also told you that 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54% when played perfectly on a single-line machine or a multi-line machine. What we told you was true — as long as we are looking at the long term.
Liam W. Daily, the late co-author of the Dancer/Daily strategy cards and Winner’s Guides, once pointed out to me that whether or not you win an individual hand can matter a great deal depending on whether you are playing a single-line game or a multi-line game.
Take an ordinary sort of hand like 2♦ 5♥ 6♥ 7♣ 8♦ and assume you are playing a game without wild cards where straights return 20 coins for your 5-coin bet. The obvious play is to hold 5678. You will win if you draw any 4 or 9. There are 8 such cards out of the 47 still in the deck. Having 8 chances of success out of 47 come out to 17% — a little better than 1 in 6. So 17% of the time we win a net of 15 coins (the 20 coins we win minus the 5 we bet) and 83% of the time we lose our original bet.
In Triple Play, though, it is different. Since we are betting a total of 15 coins (5 on each line) and a straight returns 20 coins, we will end up being a winner for the hand if one or more of the three possible straights materialize. This will happen 43% of the time. Same hand, yet the probability of whether or not we win on it is very different.
In Five Play, since we are betting 25 coins, we need to collect two or more straights in order to win. This happens 20% of the time. In Ten Play, we need three of the 20-coin straights to make up for our 50-coin ante, and this happens 23% of the time. In Fifty Play, we need to connect on 13 or more straights in order to win, and this happens 7% of the time. And at Hundred Play, we will only get EXACTLY 25 straights (which will give us our money back) 1.2% of the time, and we will only make money 1.5% of the time.
I find this interesting. How can we say the overall odds of winning are the same and yet have such different chances to end up a net winner on any particular hand? This seems to be a contradiction. The explanation lies in the fact that these numbers only consider HOW OFTEN you win rather than HOW MUCH you win.
Consider our hand in Triple Play: You will get zero straights (losing 15 coins) 57% of the time. You will get one straight (winning 5 coins) 35% of the time. You will get two straights (winning 25 coins) 7% of the time. And you will get three straights (winning 45 coins) about 0.5% of the time. The average return on the 15-coin bet will be 10.2 coins (meaning you will lose 4.8 coins) whether the 15 coins were bet on a single-line game or a Triple Play game.
I was sitting next to a man playing Fifty Play and he asked me about his chances for success on just such a hand. I don’t have these numbers memorized, so I got back to him the next day and told him that 13 out of 14 times he would lose money starting from this hand on this game. He responded, “I thought so. I almost NEVER win. So that’s why I throw everything away. Who knows, I might collect on a royal! After all, I have fifty shots at it!”
BAD LOGIC. Completing a royal on the redraw from this position is 380,000 to 1 against you (or over 500,000 to 1 against if one of the cards tossed is an A, K, Q, J, or T). Even having 50 shots at that is still extremely unlikely. Most of us will never have a “royal on the redraw” in our lives. Basing your decisions on such a possibility rather than a realistic look at the probabilities is an expensive way to play. Since this guy was playing Fifty Play for dollars (which means $250 per play!), his decision to throw everything away was costing him $165 each time he did it.
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