I regularly see and hear what players perceive as rare events taking place in casinos. Usually it’s something in the mid six-figure to one shots. A dealt royal is roughly 650,000 to 1 for example. As tough as that is, you see that now and then and may have even had one yourself. Last month I was at a blackjack table where the dealer drew to an 8 card 21. That one I don’t think I had ever seen before so snapped a pic and later did a little research on it’s rarity. Turns out it’s somewhere north of a million to one shot. OK – pretty good. Worth noting and showing around but not something people may have never seen before.
Having been at this gambling thing for close to 30 years now I finally saw one that I’m pretty certain I’ll never see again. All things considered I’d call this the Holy Grail of video poker hands. Check it out.
So the first time I saw this I did a double take. “What am I looking at?” I asked. It was explained that the player (who I’ve known for over 20 years) was dealt a four card royal on a machine where a dealt royal was part of the specific motivation for playing. This particular bank has a separate meter for it which helped the overall payback. Upper left hand corner at the top you can see the All-Royal meter at $12,280. This is a 25-cent machine so that’s a fairly big number for anything on a quarter machine. Getting dealt four when you need all five for the meter was obviously a bummer — for the moment.
After bemoaning their luck and acknowledging just how close they came to hitting that jackpot it came time to draw to the hand. Nowhere in your head are you even considering hitting a royal on each line. The hope is you can maybe nab one of the three, which you’re a big underdog to do.
Then the draw – Bam! Bam!! Bam!!!
It takes a moment for something like that to register. Eventually processing what just occurred they then realize that the machine did not differentiate between a dealt royal and somehow drawing to three royals so it awarded the meter. What was a near-miss of the jackpot a moment ago turns into a miraculous hand that also takes down the meter — the hard way!
One interesting thing about this hand is that when it was first shown to me the probability was vastly understated. The quoted number of one in 103,823 would be correct IF you skipped right to the draw. As far as comparing it to other rare events in VP like the dealt royal or getting a sequential royal, this is not the way to document it. As presented, it was a one in 103,823 occurrence which are just the odds of drawing the same specifically needed card three consecutive times — (47x47x47). That part is right, but that’s just three of the four things that must happen to arrive at this particular result. You have to be dealt four to the royal first! This can’t be ignored. That’s a one in 2,777 shot itself. So what was presented as a one in 103,823 hand occurrence is, in fact, one in 288,316,471 — (2777x47x47x47).
Now 288,316,471 is a really big number so let’s give it some perspective.
The average decent player can get out about 600 hands per hour. Some people play slower but a decent regular player can do 600.
At 600 hands per hour a COMPUTER playing non-stop would reach that number of hands after 54 years 310 days 6 hours. That’s letting the computer run non-stop for over 54 years. Using something we call the Gamblers Formula (a short-cut calculation you can use to set an OV/UN line for rare events) you’d be EV money to see this hand occur in the first 38 years.
A human who can play 600 hands per hour that plays 20 hours a week, each and every week of the year, would see that hand an average of once every 462 years of play. Most people view a dealt royal as a once in a lifetime thing – if that. You should get one every 650,000 hands on average. During those 462 years of play that it would take to get just one of the Holy Grail hands you’d expect to get 443 dealt royals.
We’re talking Powerball type odds. in fact, hitting Powerball is a good comparison. Powerball jackpot odds are 1 in 292,201,338 — a difference of just 1.34%.
What’s special about this is the astounding improbability of the hand and the fact that a dealt royal was a big reason for playing. Getting dealt the near miss and then miraculously getting there in the manner they did makes this the greatest video poker hand I’ve ever seen.
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I think the bigger question is why you were playing at a 6:5 blackjack table…
If this happened at the Tangiers Sam Rothstein would have that slot manager fired instantly.
“It cannot happen… would not happen, you fuckin’ momo! What’s the matter with you! Didn’t you see you were bein’
set up on the second win?
Why are you playing 6-5 blackjack?
A waitress at the Lady Luck was DEALT a RF.Her hands were shaking when she held all 5 cards.
On a 100 play “ not so ugly deuces” computer sim playing 5 cents (500 coin total per play – $25) I flopped A K Q J of Spades and 10 of Clubs. On the draw I got 6 Royals and 7 Wild Royals, along with a bunch of Flushes and Straights for a total win of 25160 coins. I have a pic if anyone wants to see it. I just it would have been real!
How do you “try to get dealt a royal” on this type of machine? Don’t you always do that on ANY machine?
Re the 6:5 questions, it was explained on Vsin that he was in a BJ tourney. It was not a cash game.
I think what he was trying to say is that since she was playing a machine that had a progressive for the dealt, she “wanted/was trying for” the royal.
Exactly what I was thinking
The only trouble with having this happen is that due to the resultant karmic imbalance, the person who hit it will soon be walking along one day, whistling, when a loaded cement mixer will hit a slick patch, cartwheel off the freeway, and splat him like Godzilla vs. Bambi.
Strangely enough, the odds of that happening are exactly 1 in 288, 316,471!
The blackjack hand was in a tournament. BJs paid 2-1 – those are tournament chips.
The All-Royal meter was a big part of why that machine was being played.
That’s what “trying to get a dealt royal” was referring to.
I was dealt a royal on the redraw after throwing all cards away. Happened at Aquarius in Laughlin. What are the odds on that.
Friend of wife & mine did this at Imokalee(sp?), Fl. about 2 years ago. Hit Q of diamonds, I think on 3 hand 25c DDB. I saw the picture.
1 in 288,316,471 BEFORE the hand was dealt. After the hand was dealt, then 47x47x47 (1 in 103,823). Anyone who triple plays regularly, will see a triple repeat once in a while no matter what 4 cards you hold. Whether or not it improves the hand doesn’t matter.
Same situation in roulette. A repeater can be 1 in 37, 38 or 39 depending on which wheel you’re at. But that’s after the first spin. It can also be 1 in 1369, 1444, or 1521 BEFORE spinning and calling a specific number.
Regardless, it’s still cool to see
This also reminds me of a time playing $1/$2 NLHE when on consecutive hands, I was dealt K♦️ K♣️ and both times flopped the K♥️. Remember, this is with 2 different decks on back to back hands and the use of those deckmate automatic shufflers.
“Trying to get a dealt royal” means that was the specific reason for playing this game — the dealt RF had the bonus that made it an overlay.
Anyone who has photos of rare events like this should put them up. I want to see them.
Since the individual meters did not enter into the payout of this hand, does that mean that they continued to accumulate from the point shown in the photo? If so, this remained a positive play of about 1/2% or so?
What was the All Royals meter reset amount?
As rare as all these cited events are, they happen! I heard about one last night though that I really do doubt but if a picture is produced then we’ll have a new leader in the clubhouse. The odds of it occurring couldn’t be calculated on my phone calculator so until seen it’s just a rumor.
Happened to me on Five Play Multi Strike Video Poker at Red Rock. Advanced all five hands to the second level on a 25¢ machine. Dealt me a royal. $10,000!
Have a picture but couldn’t figure out how to post it.
Good luck, all
I got a dealt royal at NYNY and it automatically saved all 5 cards and started paying out.
i was deal a royal at Fremont 3 months ago. 5-6 years ago guy and wife was playing the 3 play at Main Street Station and was deal a royal on bottom line thus 3 royals. they took money and run. at BeauRivage on gulf coast many years ago lady was playing 25 coin duece and received 4 dueces on bottom line for 25. i believe she won 25 k. rare but they do happen
“Trying to get a royal” means that someone is neglecting optimal strategy (perfect play) in order to go for a royal. Perhaps the ideal hold will be holding an extra flush card or two instead of just holding the 2 or 3 royal cards. On most strategy cards, you will see “4 of a flush” listed higher up on the card than “2 of a royal”. Another common situation is being dealt a straight flush of KQJT9; the people who go for a royal will discard the 9 in hopes of drawing the A. But that’s an inferior play unless there’s a huge bonus on the royal. On a normal pay table, the SF would pay 250 while the royal would pay 4000, or 16 times as much, but the odds of drawing the royal-completer on the draw are 1-in-47, so the superior play is to keep the straight flush. But you cannot try to get a DEALT royal, unless you have some kind of supernatural power that you can exert.
My wife, who’s a dealer, told me she’s dealt a 9-card 21, with 5 aces.
I had a friend who hit a Royal on 1-2-3 Let it Ride with min bet and $1 bonus bet. The final payout was something like $36K. Yowza! When the dealer called the pit boss over, he used his body to cover all bets until they verified the win on camera.
When certain IGT video poker machines aren’t being played, they repeat a simulated spade royal to entice play: Ts, Js, Qs, blank, As, then thow the blank and draw the Ks.
I GOT THAT EXACT SEQUENCE LAST NIGHT FOR REAL FOR $20,000. I have a photo but I don’t know how to upload it here. I calculate the odds at 1 in 311,875,200.
I believe the blank you refer to is the 7♥️
How much “free” publicity for the 3 RF’s ? All these things are accounted for. Nothing in those games is “random”
Here one probably never seen before. Get dealt a throw away hand like 2♠️ 4♠️ 5♥️ 7♥️ 9♦️ on a triple play game and draw 2 royals or more royals. Not just one.
Thank you, LC Larry. And I have to correct the odds of my hand: 52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 47 = 305,377,800 to 1. The drawn Ks is with 47 cards remaining.
I’m guessing that one is much tougher even though you get up to bat numerous times per hour.
That’s actually the one I was referencing earlier. There was a claim that it happened but no documentation.
I had to come back to relook at the picture of that machine, because there is a thread on WoV called “Impossible Lucky Draws” in which a YouTube video shows a guy holding KK on a 10 play Double Bonus game in which he drew the other 2 kings on ALL ten hands. After further investigation, it was determined, that particular machine was a VLT. Thankfully here, the picture of those royals showing Gold Coast being the casino. In which case, it wouldn’t have been a VLT. Unless one was placed there in error.
Very, very good point LC Larry. Any hand received on a machine with questionable regulation could easily be a predetermined return. The path taken to get there may have nothing to do with hitting a long shot and everything to do with the predetermined final hand due to payback requirements. Thanks. Excellent find and addendum to this hand.
Highly likely this isn’t an intended “feature” of the game; rather, it’s a bug. It’s often useful to think through a game from the programmer’s perspective. How would a coder, who may not even understand the game, accomplish a particular task? We generally want payoffs to be awarded after a hand is complete, especially when there may be a variety of different bets, bonuses, points, etc. So when the hand is over, the programmer wants to determine whether the jackpot should be awarded. The right way is to look at what the originally dealt hand was, which is a variable that probably was saved by the program. If that originally dealt hand is a Royal, award jackpot. But this jackpot may have been added to the game at a later date, or by a different coder, or the original code to handle the main game may be bundled up in a precompiled library that no one wants to touch, etc. So the coder has a light-bulb moment, “Aha! If every line is a Royal, it must have been a dealt Royal. So I can handle this at the end, without looking at the earlier part of the code, and just check if every playline is a Royal.” It is possible that the programmer thought of the possible scenario of re-drawing to every Royal, and decided it was too rare to worry about, but I doubt it! They’re advertising a jackpot for a dealt Royal, and it wouldn’t be that tough to code it correctly. I think this is most likely a logical error/oversight on the programmer’s part, but they got lucky this time, and the bug didn’t cost the casino anything. They don’t always get lucky! Mistakes of this nature are quite common when the coder is not an expert at the subject matter itself, which is why outsourcing a programming project to cheap Third-World coders often produces poor results.
What would have happened if the jackpot were huge, and another gambler who didn’t win complained that the jackpot was improperly awarded to a guy who wasn’t dealt a Royal, but got his Royals on the re-draw?
Isn’t the probability 1/(47x47x49x51x52) = 1/287,055,132? Haha, just trolling. Whatever it is, It’s a big-stinkin’ number!
Frank, can you explain the Gambler’s Formula short cut you mentioned here?
So the Gamblers Formula is technically called something else. Math guys will know the proper term. In a nutshell it’s a quick and dirty way of establishing an OV/UN line for a rare event. So for a Royal Flush or a 10 team parlay it would work as a fast answer to the question “How many trials will it take to yield a 50% chance of this rare event occurring.” You just need to know the cycle (say 40,000 hands for a Royal Flush) and then you multiply that number by .69. Like I said, it’s just something we tucked away a long time ago and I can not really recall where I first learned it. I thought it was Epsteins “The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic” but could find no reference to it there. It works for long shot events where the cycle size is established so it comes up at times when examining a gambling event. The .69 may not be the exact multiplier but it’s close enough to give you a good idea of what the OV/UN line is. I just remember we used .69 and it would yield the approximate answer.
So got curious and tried to hunt down the book I first saw Gamblers Formula. It took Curtis to suggest a few titles before we hit on it. It was Peter Griffin’s “Extra Stuff — Gambling Ramblings” so we’re talking close to 30 years ago. He actually called it “Gamblers Rule of Thumb.” When skimming for it I had forgotten just how good a book that was and how much of what’s in there I’ve carried with me through the years.
I don’t have my books in front of me, so I don’t know if Griffin provided a derivation, but here it is: Suppose you have a small probability p like hitting a Royal once every B hands, so the probability p = 1/B, where B is a big number like 40000. We want to find the threshold number of hands N where there is a 50% chance you hit no Royals, and a 50% chance that you hit one or more Royals. The probability of hitting no Royals = (1-p)^N = 0.50. To solve for N, take log of both sides, giving us N log(1-p) = log(0.5). That means N=log(0.5)/log(1-p). Here comes the trick. Approximate log(1-p) using the first two terms of a Taylor expansion log(x)=(x-1)-(1/2)((x-1)^2). So log(1-p) is approximately (-p)-(1/2)((-p)^2). Remember p=1/B, so if we substitute that back in, we get N=(2(B^2)log(0.5))/(-2B-1). Our next trick is to say that since B is a big number, the denominator (-2B-1) is approximately equal to (-2B). So now our equation is N = (2(B^2)log(0.5))/(-2B). Cancel 2B from both numerator and denominator and you get N=Blog(0.5)/(-1). But log(0.5) is -0.69, so we get the rule that N=0.69B. So if B=40000 hands, then at N=27600 hands, it’s roughly an even proposition that you’d have no Royals, vs. at-least-one Royal. (Check my math–it’s been a long time since I did any math or read Griffin!)
@FrankB How would you explain the Green Bay Packers not going for the touchdown and opting for a field goal late in the 4th quarter, 4th and goal with minutes left in the game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 2020 NFC Championship game at Lambeau Field?
My only explanation is that sports is rigged and it was an upper management decision which decided to put the ball back in Tom Brady’s hands so late in the game, thus sealing the win for the Bucs!