New Video Poker Games at G2E from a Player’s Point of View

At this year’s G2E gaming show, I published a discussion of new video poker games — written for casino managers. You can see that here.

Today’s article is addressed to players — but it assumes you have read the previous article. Any phrasing that is exactly the same in the two articles is listed in italics, so you can skip that part if you’ve read the earlier words.

IGT

1. Magic Deal Poker

This is a 10-coins-per-line game. It plays like regular video poker, except about 3.8% of the time, on the deal, you receive one, two, or (very rarely) three mystery cards.

In general, I liked this game. It is similar to Dream Card poker, except:

Dream Card has one mystery card whose value is determined BEFORE the draw. You can change the dream card if you don’t like the card selected by the machine.

1. Magic Deal has one, two, or three mystery cards whose value is determined AFTER the draw. You cannot change such mystery cards, although in no cases did I see a hand where the machine picked a less-than-max-value card.
2. Dream Card has obnoxious sound effects; fortunately, they’re missing from this game.

Another way to phrase the mystery cards occurring 3.8% of the time is to say that they happen 1-in-26 hands. That means you are paying twice what the hands are worth 25 out of 26 hands — and then hopefully you catch up when the multipliers come.

For players who “test the waters” by playing a few hands to see how things are going, this game will very frequently cause your score to drop like a stone. For players who believe that today’s score matters, this game will cause many of you to go away muttering.

The correct plays when you receive one or more mystery cards aren’t always that obvious. Letting an M stand for a mystery card and assuming you were playing a game just like 9/6 Double Double Bonus (except for the 10-coin per line ante and the occasional mystery card(s)), how would you play this hand: K♠ Q♠ Q♦ M M?

Deuces Wild players who see the mystery cards as basically equivalent to wild cards will hold QQMM, which would be correct in Deuces Wild. This is the wrong play here. KQMM is a much better play. Why is the play in this game different from the way you’d play in Deuces Wild? Because if you draw one of the remaining three royal cards in Deuces Wild, you’ll get paid for a wild royal, frequently worth 125 coins. If you draw one of the same cards in Mystery Card, you’ll get paid for a 4,000-coin natural royal.

2. Ultimate X Spin Poker

Ultimate X and Spin Poker are both popular games — and this game links them well. It should work. Ultimate X is a 10-coins-per-line game and Spin Poker doesn’t require any additional money to play, so this game also costs 10 coins per line — or 90 coins overall.

Players who try to figure the correct strategy on this game will find it a much different problem than figuring out how to play “regular” Ultimate X. In regular Ultimate X, each of the lines deals with its own 47-card pack of cards — which is the original 52 cards minus the five you were dealt.

In the Spin Poker version, you have one 52-card deck in play. If you draw the A♥, for example, in one of the fifteen spaces, you cannot also draw the same card in another place. Additionally, because of the way the lines in Spin Poker cross each other, you’ll usually get each card drawn in three separate lines (although it will be two lines or five lines in the center column.)

What this means is that the variance in the Spin Poker version of Ultimate X will be significantly higher than it is in the Ten Play version of Ultimate X. Those who play regular Ultimate X know it already has a sky-high variance.

I really dislike it that you can’t play off your multipliers at the end of a session by betting five coins. I know there are players who make their living playing off these multipliers, but as a player who plays the game for hours at a time I find the regular stream of players coming in a checking the multipliers on every game of every machine to be annoying.

3. Bonus Streak Ultimate X

This is a very difficult game to play at 10-coins-per-line. Instead of the usual multipliers you earn on the next hand in regular Ultimate X, here you earn a stream of multipliers over the next several hands. That is, you might earn a stream of 2x, 3x, 4x, 8x,12x over the next five games. If while playing this stream you receive a paying hand big enough to create additional multipliers (at least 3-of-a-kind in most games) all remaining multipliers on that line go to 12x.

The stream of multipliers created by getting certain hands creates a nightmare for players to analyze. “Regular” Ultimate X is tough enough and the games overhold the par sheet values. This game will be much tougher. And the correct strategy will be very different from that of “regular” Ultimate X. I see this game only being successful for low stakes for recreational players.

This game is very difficult to play correctly. There are many, many different possible combinations of multiplier streams. In addition, low paying hands (usually Jacks or Better and Two Pair in games without wild cards) do NOT earn multipliers. This makes basic strategy on this game very different from that of regular Ultimate X.

4. Color Match Royals

The premise of the game is that the hand A♣ K♠ Q♣ J♠ T♠ is called a Black Royal, paying 2000 coins, and the hand A♦ K♦ 7♥ 4♥ 2♦ is called a Red Flush, which pays a little less than a regular flush. You also have black and red straight flushes.

Although I don’t know the exact strategy, it appears as though you should go for “color flushes” a high percentage of the time. This makes the game very boring as you are generally trying for a hand worth 20 coins when you have to pay 10 coins to play. If you don’t go for the color flushes, you’re giving up a lot of expected value.

Currently on www.videopoker.com there’s a free tutorial on how to play this game.  It is a simplified strategy, but I know of none better out there.

I do not like this game very much. To me, it doesn’t pass the “fun to play” test.

There are streams talking about this game on vpFREE, wizardofvegas, videopoker.com, and possibly other sites as well. I am not alone in my non-appreciation. Check out those discussions if you want more information.

5. Super Triple Play Jackpots

Generally, I liked this game — but not the name. This is a form of “Wheel Poker.” Possibly there are some patent or royalty issues I don’t understand, but using “Wheel Poker” in the title would tell players what they are getting.

This game combines Super Triple Play, which is a 6-coin-per-line game where you get higher-than-usual payouts on 4-of-a-kinds (usually, depending on the game), and Wheel Poker, where you also pay an extra coin per line and you get to spin the wheel when you receive a 4-of-a-kind. Adding these games together makes this a 7-coins-per-line game.

The strategy is relatively easy to figure out assuming you have an approximately-correct figure for the average wheel spin.

In the original Wheel Poker, the wheel spin was worth about 430 on average. If I were collecting data while playing, I’d start with that number. I’d collect data on at least a few thousand spins before I came up with my “final answer.”

6. Flip & Pay Poker

This was my favorite new game in this year’s mix. The game is relatively easy to understand without software, and the idea is different and interesting.

This is a 10-coin-per-line game, where the machine will flip at most one card under the following conditions:

1. One card will be flipped one rank higher or lower, and always the same suit. That is, the 8♣ will only be flipped to a 9♣ or a 7♣.
2. This is done with a 52-card deck, so if there is an A♦ 2♦ on the deal, the 2♦ will not flip to an A♦ because there aren’t duplicates in a 52-card deck.
3. The resulting hand must be two pair or higher for flipping to occur.
4. The flipped hand must be higher in Expected Value than the unflipped hand.

For example, if you were dealt 5♠ 6♥ 7♣ 8♦ 8♠, one of the 8s will flip to a 9, giving you a dealt straight.

If you don’t like the flipping, you can unflip. Sometimes some of the flips may seem strange. For example, in Triple Double Bonus, assume you are dealt A♣ A♦ 5♠ 6♥ 7♣, the machine will flip to AA557 or AA667 or AA577. Whether the machine flips or not, good players are just going to hold the pair of aces and throw away the other three cards.

Most players will not be sure whether it’s better to be dealt AA667 or AA567, given you’re just going to be holding the aces. The machine likes flipping to two pair (correctly!) but which is better is a mystery to most players and many will unflip.

My only problem with the game is the machine makes the choices and many players will be unsure why choices were made. The rules aren’t all that difficult — but they’re a bit tricky until you get used to them. A player dealt A♦ A♠ A♥ K♠ 5♥ REALLY wants that king to be flipped to an ace and may get angry when it doesn’t happen. If a floor person or shift manager is called over, that person MUST be fluent with the reason the K doesn’t flip to an ace (because the player already has an A♠ and the hand can’t contain two of them).

When I first played the game, I didn’t read the help screens. I tried to figure out the rules for myself. I tried to come up with cases where the smart player would unflip — such as K♦ Q♦ J♦ T♦ 8♠. If the 8 flipped to a 9, giving you a straight, you definitely should want to unflip. You’re going to throw the card away anyway, but you want all four 9s still in the pack rather than just three of them. When I read the rules for flipping, they said cards were only flipped when there was an increase in EV — so that should mean the 8 would not be flipped to a 9. But I’m not sure. That’s a fairly rare hand and nobody in the booth was positively sure how the game was programmed.

Scientific Games

The only other company I saw at the show that offered “ready everywhere now” new video poker games was Scientific Games. What they offered is a very close copy of IGT’s Triple Play series of games on which the patent expired not so long ago.

The Scientific Games version includes Single Hand, Triple Hand, Five Hand, Ten Hand, Twenty-Five Hand, Fifty Hand, and Hundred Hand games on the same machine. Players will figure out quickly that Fifty Hand is basically the same game as Fifty Play. The game titles are the same ones used by IGT, namely Jacks or Better, Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus, etc.

In two of the games, Scientific Games uses a different name than IGT does. It may have been intentional, but both times it struck me as a typographical mistake. They used the name Triple Bonus for a game that IGT calls Triple Double Bonus. Triple Bonus is an older game based on Kings or Better and it’s very different from Triple Double Bonus. Also, Scientific Games has a game called Joker’s Wild rather than Joker Wild.

The pay schedules on the Scientific Games are very similar to the IGT pay schedules, except often the straight flush pays 275 coins rather than 250. This adds about 0.05% to the player and is essentially a type of bribe to induce players to try the Scientific Games version rather than IGT’s.

So far this game hasn’t sold well, so players may never see it.

The game has several features of the latest WMS games (which came out two or three years ago.) WMS has been swallowed up by Scientific Games which is why you see those features here. As I recall, Station Casinos (now Red Rock Resorts) had the Las Vegas locals market monopoly on these games, and Harrah’s (now Caesars) had the national monopoly. These two casino chains never put these machines with good pay schedules so they didn’t take off. Once other casinos saw their results, they didn’t want the games either.