Not too long ago I wrote an article about the auto-hold on Oregon lottery machines that was pretty poor. See it here
As stated in that article, I felt that the manufacturer had no obligation to guarantee that the hold was optimal unless such a declaration was posted somewhere on the machine.
Comments I read after the article appeared indicated that my opinion was in the minority among video poker players. Most of the players who expressed an opinion said that the holds should be correct on either a basic strategy or perfect strategy level.
But of course, it can’t be both. Basic strategy (defined here to be the best play not including penalty cards) holds aren’t always the same as perfect strategy (defined here to be computer perfect) holds. Which do you want? Whichever way you choose, there will be others who disagree.
As an example, let’s take a very common game with lots of penalty card situations— NSU Deuces Wild. Should the auto-hold use perfect strategy and distinguish A♠ K♥ T♥ 9♣ 5♥ (where the correct play is to draw five new cards) from A♠ K♥ T♥ 8♣ 5♥ (where the correct play is to hold ‘KT’)?
If auto-hold makes the correct plays based on perfect strategy, I assure you that I’ll get dozens of emails asking me why the auto-holds aren’t consistent. I can correctly explain that when you have both an A and a 9 as penalties, a flush penalty USUALLY means you throw the hand away. But this is too complicated for most people who would write me these emails. Telling them that a more complete explanation may be found in the Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guide to NSU Deuces Wild (which is conveniently available on www.bobdancer.com) will strike some of these people as a greedy thing for me to say. Ignoring the email would be worse. How would you suggest that I respond?
If penalty cards are not considered, what about situations which are the opposite of penalty cards? Penalty cards are cards that are removed from the pack of 47 cards and therefore make drawing a particular hand more difficult. The following example has nothing to do with penalty cards: Letting a W stand for a deuce, compare W 5♥ 6♠ 7♣ Q♣—where you should hold the deuce by itself—with W 5♥ 6♠ 7♣ J♣—where the correct play is to hold W567. Do you make that distinction?
Or how about situations where the differences between hands may or may not be attributed to penalty cards? For example, A♦ 3♦ 4♦ 5♣ 7♣—where you should hold the 4-card inside straight—is different from A♦ 3♦ 4♦ 6♣ 7♣—where you should hold the 3-card straight flush. On the Dancer/Daily advanced strategy, we distinguish between these two examples as an “A-low 3-card straight flush” with or without a straight penalty. But you don’t have to describe it that way. You can list all of the 4-card inside straights that are superior to A-low straight flushes and all the ones that are inferior. The list has several entries in it—which can be a problem if humans are attempting to memorize the list and not confuse any of these hands, but since a computer program is making the decisions on the auto-hold, “several entries” is no problem whatsoever for a computer.
If these distinctions aren’t made, I would get emails from people who say the auto-hold says one thing and Video Poker for Winners says another, so what’s wrong with the program?
There are numerous other examples from NSU that I could list. There are numerous examples from EVERY video poker game that I could list.
My solution of “the manufacturer isn’t required to make perfect suggestions” avoids all of these decisions. It’s a caveat emptor situation. I know that’s a Latin phrase for “buyer beware” rather than “video poker player beware,” but I don’t know how to say “video poker player” in Latin!
If you don’t like my suggestion, you have to make some tricky decisions about how good you want the auto-hold to be. And whatever decision you make, you can be guaranteed that many players prefer something different. It’s easy to say imperfect auto-holds are bad. It’s not easy to define what a good auto-hold should look like.