What I Saw at G2E

Every year, the gaming industry holds its biggest show-and-tell convention of the year in Las Vegas, called the Global Gaming Expo or G2E. And every year, I go and look at what’s coming up in the near future.

This year there were two new games I found worth mentioning, both by Action Gaming (aka videopoker.com) in the IGT booth.

The first was Stack’em High, a 10-coin per line game which can be played in a Triple Play or Five Play version. On the deal, whenever you are dealt exactly two or three aces and ONLY hold those cards, you get extra hands starting from those aces. As the hands are dealt out one at the time (including the original Triple Play or Five Play hands), if you get another ace it “sticks” for all hands going forward.

How many hands you get depends on both whether you’re playing Triple Play or Five Play, and also the game. If you’re playing Bonus Poker, for example, where four aces return 400, you’ll get a lot more hands than if you’re playing Triple Double Bonus Poker, where four aces return 800 or sometimes 4,000.

The one strategy variation I saw was on a hand like AAA46 in Triple Double Bonus, the correct hold normally is AAA4. On this game, just hold the aces. It is BY FAR the better play. Even on a hand like A♠ A♥ K♥ Q♥ J♥, it is BY FAR better to hold the pair of aces. A pair of aces on the deal in Double Double Bonus is worth 300 or so coins, and a 4-card-royal is worth 90 or so (depending on the pay schedule). It’s not close. Another, more frequent hand, which is even less close is A♠ A♥ 5♣ 5♦ 5♠. With a full house worth less than 50 and a pair of aces worth 300, you should be able to figure out the correct play.

The only place I saw where you wouldn’t break the hand is on Deuces Bonus and Deuces Double Bonus. In these games, the special cards are deuces. Using a W to indicate a deuce, if you’re dealt W W A♥ A♣ A♦, to just hold the deuces you’d have to throw away a hand called five aces. Since five aces are worth 400 or 800 coins in the games we’re talking about, hold all five cards. I haven’t worked it out being dealt five aces with three deuces, but it wouldn’t surprise me that you just hold the deuces in both of these games.

In Ultimate X Gold you always get to play off your multipliers and your multipliers apply to all hands. As in other Ultimate X variations, it’s 10 coins per line. On every dealt hand paying at least 5 coins, you get an increase in multipliers in various categories. (It bothers me calling Jacks or Better, a 5-coin payout, a “winning hand” when you paid 10 coins to get five. Maybe that’s just me.) The multipliers keep increasing until you get a maximum of 10x.

The strategy changes with every additional multiplier. Whether straights get 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x etc., and/or flushes get 1x, 2x, 3x, etc., all matters some. There are thousands of combinations of multipliers you can end up with. To figure it all out, each pay schedule took more than 100 hours of running two of the most powerful computers available. Good luck with figuring that out at home!

Interestingly, new bar top boxes by IGT, Aristocrat, and Scientific Games created more of an impact with me than the games themselves. All have USB ports on them so you can recharge your cell phone while playing. Two of them offered curved screens where the top of the screen curved upwards like the end of a ski. I didn’t play it long enough to reach a firm conclusion about how much easier these were to play.

All three boxes are raised a bit, so if a drink is spilled on the surface of the bar, the liquid doesn’t get into the innards of the machine and make the buttons sticky. 

At the end of the day, it’s what games are inside the boxes that will determine how popular these boxes are. IGT is far and away the industry leader in video poker, and their games are far more popular than the others. Aristocrat and SG have popular slot machine games on their boxes, and among certain audiences, that’s important.

One thing that bothered me was the camera installed at the top of the SG games. The SG logo, about the size of a postage stamp, contained a small camera lens hooked up to a powerful facial recognition system. If you’ve ever played without a card because you’ve been 86’d but still want to play a progressive, stay away from SG machines. And if you ever play on somebody else’s card, also stay away from SG machines. I found the same logo containing a camera on many of the new slot machines they offered as well.

The “Big Brother is Watching You” cameras may be the sign of the future, or even the sign of the present to some degree, but many players still avoid those cameras when they can. So, for now, that will mean avoiding the machines from Scientific Games.