Holding All Five Cards

A friend of mine, I’ll call him “Dan,” was playing Ten Play Jacks or Better and was dealt AAAA7. Dan held only the four aces and hit the deal button. Since Jacks or Better is not a kicker game, he received 125 coins for each of the 10 lines. While this is a nice score, it pales in comparison to being dealt the same hand in Double Double Bonus, which Dan also sometimes plays. He noted that he received two kickers and, therefore, would have received (8 x 800) + (2 x 2,000) = 10,400 coins playing DDB rather than the “mere” 1,250 credits he received playing Jacks or Better. Dan didn’t hold the fifth card so that he could see how many “kickers” he would have received had he been playing Double Double Bonus. Apparently Dan has a small streak of masochism and wanted to know just how badly he should feel for NOT playing Double Double Bonus.

A player next to him, “Sam,” whom Dan didn’t know, chastised Dan for just holding the aces and not the 7 as well. Sam said, “Don’t you know that if the machine malfunctions and you receive a fifth ace on one of the hands, that fifth ace would void all pays. Since you can avoid that problem easily by holding all five cards, you should do it!”

Dan has heard this argument for years. But Dan is also not shy about speaking up. “Have you EVER heard of a second ace of spades being dealt which would cause such a malfunction?”

Sam replied, “Not personally, but my ex-wife said her brother knew of a guy who thinks it might have happened to him once.”

Dan smiled. He knew there was no point in debating someone who used this kind of evidence. So he let the matter drop and just kept playing.

I have another friend, “Pete,” who would have held all five cards. Pete will not offer unsolicited advice if you do differently, but for his own play he is passionate about holding all five cards in that situation. Pete has never seen such a malfunction, but if it could POSSIBLY happen, he thinks it might. And if it could happen to anybody, Pete believes it would happen to him because he is Mr. Unlucky. So since it costs nothing to guard against it, he holds all five cards. Fair enough.

Dan has an opposing point of view. “I sometimes play Double Double Bonus and sometimes I play Deuces Wild as well. In those games it can be a HUGE mistake to hold all five cards. If you make it a practice to ALWAYS hold five cards on dealt quads, and you switch games from time to time, you run the risk of inadvertently holding five cards in the wrong game.

I agree with Dan. On a practical basis, when I’m playing Jacks or Better, I sometimes hold all five cards and sometimes I don’t. But whether I hold four or five cards, I usually wait at least two seconds after holding the cards before pressing the deal button. I want to guard against a card becoming un-held because of a sticky button or my own mis-key. Those problems are MUCH more likely to happen than the type of machine malfunction Sam was worried about.

Author’s Note: In last week’s puzzle column I asked for email responses from readers about whether they would like to see more such columns. I received passionate responses on both sides and I thank all of you for taking the time to “vote.” Some of my readers LOVE puzzles and others told me they HATE columns like that. The “do it again” side sent more responses by about a 60-40 margin than did the “don’t you dare” folks. Hardly a resounding majority. I’ll probably do it again about once a year or so. Hopefully that’s enough to satisfy the one side while being rare enough to avoid irritating the other side too severely.

I also received notice from a valued friend that two of the answers weren’t 100% correct. In the $1 NSU Triple Play hand, we asked for the largest jackpot you could receive less than $1,200. Our answer of $1,175 was correct assuming you played 15 coins. Someone noted that if you only played 14 coins and received four deuces and a wild royal on the bottom two lines and 5 of a kind on the top line, your total would be $1,189. That’s a correct answer we hadn’t considered, probably because in the real world playing 14 coins is a pretty stupid play.

Also, the solution to the last problem was to use 8 each $5, $20, and $100 bills to pay off the $1,000 marker. You also could have used 125 each $1, $2, and $5 bills to reach the same total. There was wording in the problem that probably precluded this answer (we asked for a “small” number of bills but didn’t define “small”), but nonetheless, it was a clever solution that we hadn’t considered.