One of the casinos I play at is Dotty’s, which is a chain of more than 100 15-machine outlets all across Nevada, plus a few larger ones. There are perhaps 10 of them within 10 miles of my home.
One of the promotions that attracts me relates to W2Gs. Every week, 10% of the W2Gs earned company-wide earn a 10% bonus. That is, if you receive a $4,000 royal flush, 10% of the time you receive an additional $400 in cash. I estimate the value of that by assuming I’ll get an extra $40 for every such jackpot. (in other words, $40 every time adds up to the same number as $400 10% of the time.) I’ll end up with the same EV, although I’ll be underestimating the variance a little.
My game of choice currently is 9/5 Super Double Bonus. If I play that game for at least $25 per hand, I’ll get W2Gs for all quads as well as for each straight flush and royal flush.
I’ve known the strategy for that game for some time and I’ve written about it periodically. The question I’m looking at today and next week is: Does the strategy change with the Dotty’s promotion? And if so, what are those changes? Further, assume that I’m not a computer programmer and I don’t have access to computer software that you don’t. So how do I go about this?
I wish to learn to play the game perfectly. I understand that this may not be your goal. Still, learning how to do it is what this week’s and next week’s columns are all about. Someday there may well be a promotion that you wish to figure out.
The software I’m going to use for this analysis is the Wizard of Odds (WOO) Video Poker Strategy Calculator. It will give you a perfect strategy and it’s available for free online. Although I’m not a huge fan of the notation used on that product, it’s hard to complain too loudly when it’s free and completely accurate.
For the base game, the pay schedule is 800, 80, 160, 120, 80, 50, 9, 5, 4, 3, 1, 1 Adding 1% to each of the top six figures will make the return on one of them 50.5. Although the WOO software does accept decimal points, I prefer to multiply all of the amounts by 10. That is 8000, 800, 1600, etc. Since the strategy is calculated using relative values, multiplying all pay schedule categories by a fixed amount has no effect whatsoever on the strategy.
For the Dotty’s version, I enter the payout amounts as 8080, 808, 1616, 1212, 808, 505, 90, 50, 40, 30, 10, 10. The lowest six pay schedule categories don’t receive the 1% increase because they don’t result in W2Gs. If I wanted to bet $134 or more per single-line hand, I could get W2Gs on full houses as well. For today we can ignore that refinement.
In the chart below, the numbers in red indicate numbers for the base 9/5 SDB game. The numbers in green represent the numbers for the Dotty’s version.
The actual chart created by the WOO software has several more columns to it that I’ve omitted here. If you duplicate either the red or green Payoff numbers in the WOO Video Poker Strategy Calculator, you’ll see the omitted columns. Those columns include useful information, but not information we’re using today. If you don’t duplicate this information yourself, how do you know if you can do it? It’s not difficult, but “practice makes perfect.” If you don’t know how to use a tool, it’s the same as not having the tool at all.
In the red section of the chart, find the number 490,732,320. That’s the number of occurrences for royal flushes out of 19,933,230,517,200. (In a recent Gambling with an Edge episode, Michael Shackleford explained where this number comes from.) In the green section, the corresponding number is 491,575,464.
That means that when you change strategies to take advantage of these W2G bonuses, you get more royals. You should be able to see you also get more straight flushes, more aces, more 2s-4s, and more 5s-Ts. For some reason I’ll explain next week, you get fewer Js-Ks.
Okay. Now I know there are strategy changes. This is the first part of what I wanted to know. I now need to find out what these changes are.
I’m going to tell you what those changes are — next week. I’m going to use the WOO Video Poker Strategy Calculator to do this. What I strongly recommend is that you work this out yourself. All the information you need is in the software which is online and free. As I said before, if you don’t know how to use a tool, it’s the same as not having the tool at all.
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You don’t explain: Why in the world are you adding 1%, why is this only for the top 6 figures, why does this produce a value of 50.5, what does that 50.5 value refer to? This is all a total mystery.
Al on the Net,
You don’t explain. Why in the world are you trying to read articles when you’re illiterate, what sort of brain trauma have you suffered, why does this lead to such inane questions?
This is all a total mystery.
Bob answers all the questions you have. He added 1% because that’s the value of a 10% bonus that occurs 10% of the time. It’s only for the top 6 hands because those are the only ones that earn the bonus at the stakes discussed. It produces a value of 50.5 for four 5s through 10s because 50.5 is 1% greater than 50.
Per the Dotty’s promo, Bob 10% of the time Bob will get a 0% bump on the payout of a winning hand when he get a W-2G. That is a 1% increase in the expected win for such hands (10% of the time he gets 10% more, so it is 10% times 10%, which equals 1%. You could also calculate this by taking ten sample “wins,” bumping one of them by 10%, and then averaging them. It’s 1% more than the basic win for a given hand)
The original “50” is the number of coins you get back per coin wager on Super Double Bonus at max bet on four of a kind (5s – 10s). Because this is a W2-G at his stakes, he’s expecting to actually get 1% higher than this when he gets a W2-G, on average. A 1% increase in payment here is 1.01 * 50, which is 50.5
Good luck.
That should be 10% of the time he will get a 10% bump.
And it’s only the top 6 hands because those are the only hands that are paid out with a W2-G.
One thing I note – I believe Dotty’s also has NSUD. I’m wondering if he picked SDB to maximize the # of W2-G’s he is getting. Quite an ingenious play if so.
10% of 10% is 1%. Only applies to payoffs with w2-Gs (i.e. $1200+). It would be different for $5/hand.
Dotty’s had NSU Deuces Wild until a year or so ago. Playing $125 a hand you’d get w2Gs on straight flushes ($1250) 5-of-a-kind ($2000) Wild Royals ($3125) Deuces ($25000) and royals ($100,000). I know of at least three $100,000 royals on this game in the last year they had it and they finally said enough is enough.
Several responders have correctly answered Al’s questions. Still, I want to weigh in.
Some less-experienced readers need things spelled out more than I sometimes do. If a “low intermediate” player, however that is defined, can understand what I am talking about, then that’s what I’m aiming for.
There will always be players who are not at the low intermediate level, at least not yet.
If I explain everything so a raw beginner can understand perfectly, the articles would be three times as long and the non-beginners would be bored stiff. So I try to strike a balance.
If you are a beginner and this one was too tough, keep reading additional articles (although maybe next week’s article would be a good one to skip). the more you read, the more you will get the lingo and the basic concepts.
All of us were beginners at some point and it’s no crime to be at that level.
I just wonder why someone so intelligent, if not actually brilliant, with such a flair for math and statistics, and who has such energy, persistence and dedication that he could thrive as part of a team that is exploring the solar system or mapping DNA spends his life in a Dotty’s pushing buttons on a video poker machine.
I guess that Part Two of this story will explain why this game is worth playing when even the adjusted strategy doesn’t yield 100%.
Also, I’m curious as to what the return would be using normal SDB strategy.
You could determine the return under the “normal” payback by taking the hand outcomes from the first set columns and multiplying that by the improved payments in the second set of payments.
Why is pretty obvious – any decent player’s club/cash benefits will push this to a >100% game. We’re talking about a 99.92% base game. Getting, say, 0.3%-0.5% on top in cash back mailers makes this materially profitable. If you put $125 a spin through this game 500 times an hour, you could be clearing $150+ an hour of EV if the cash back value is 0.33%.
P is hypothesizing correctly — although the actual numbers are different.
The “best” slot club return is 0.2% . It actually varies by time of day and whether you are a senior.
The mailers vary from 0.01% to 0.4%. They vary according to your recent results. over time they are closer to 0.2%. If I’ve had a large royal or two in the past months, I get mailers of $1 a week. Yippee! If I’ve been lot so fortunate recently I get mailers representing 0.4%. It’s a fairly game with approximately the variance of DDB, so your daily scores will vary.
There are other promos that are constantly changing — but add another 0.1% to 0.2%.
You cannot play $125 a hand comfortably. Any jackpots more than $5,000 necessitate a phone call, and any jackpots over $10,000 require a hand pay after a special visit from a supervisor. WAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION. and with every set of aces ($20,000 in this scenario) you can guarantee your mailers will get greatly reduced. If you play for more modest stakes, they don’t get so excited and you will keep higher mailers longer.
But you can play considerably more than the $25 per hand I mentioned in the article. Hand pays take some time, so since you’re getting them every 400 hands or so, it slows down your hands per hour.
I never said this was my best play or my only play. The purpose of the exercise was to figure out if you needed to change strategy and if so, what was the new strategy. This is a useful exercise to know how to do.
Yeah. And there’s never any guarantee that you’ll get “decent” cashback or mailers from ANY casino these days, particularly not if you play good VP. I am well aware of how getting such benefits could turn the play positive. However, I doubt very much that the play that Bob describes is profitable to the extent you hypothesize, at least not with any dependability or consistency.
It’s obvious that Bob gets enough goodies to make this play worth his while. I was just curious as to what those might be.
Bob, interesting. And, looking at the pays, you can see how one could target playing a certain stakes that keeps certain pays under $5,000 and others under $10,000.