The title to this article implies I’ve written about this game previously. I haven’t. But I am going to refer you to somewhere else for the overview.
An excellent introduction to this game may be found at Wizardofodds.com, so start there. Rather than simply rephrasing what Michael Shackleford (the “Wizard of Odds”) has written, I think it is better to show you the original (cited with permission) and then talk about things that he didn’t address. He uses a lot more numbers after the decimal point than I do. (He can’t help it! He’s an actuary by profession.) I choose to round off numbers more so they are not quite so daunting to my readers.
Shack tells us the bonus is worth, on average, slightly less than 900 credits. Since it takes five credits per play, and the average of the bonus is slightly less than 100% (99.76%, actually), this implies that it will take you slightly more than 180 hands on average to get the bonus.
This is not every 180 hands like clockwork. There is a 1-in-590 chance that you’ll fill the wheel (via a dealt full house or better) on your very next hand. There is a 1-in-37 chance that you’ll add one more slice to the wheel on your next hand (via a dealt 3-of-a-kind, straight, or flush.) If you already have all-but-one of the slices filled, you’ll have a 1-in-35 chance to fill in the wheel on your next spin.
There will be times, of course, that you get the bonuses quickly, one right after the other. There will be other times when it takes 500 or more hands to get the bonus. That’s gambling.
The reason this is important has to do with how long you are planning to play. If you plan to play several hours, this might be a great game to play — depending on what pay schedule we’re talking about and what’s available elsewhere in the casino. If you have ten minutes to play, this game might not be such a good choice.
Most games do not have natural stopping points. This one does. You should play until you complete the wheel and get the bonus. If you continue to play, you should keep playing until you get the bonus again. Leaving before the wheel is complete gives you two unsavory choices. IGT will give you a “surrender value” for the game, which costs you a lot of EV, but is better than nothing. (According to IGT, the surrender value is NEVER the play with the highest EV.) Or, you can simply walk away from the game and leave your accumulated wheel slices for the next guy, which costs you even more EV.
In addition to the intelligent stopping point of “wait until the wheel is filled,” a lot of players have their own superstitious stopping points. Like, “if I hit a royal flush, I’m gone.” Or, “if I lose 100 credits off of my high score, I change machines.” Or, something similar. These personal stopping points are fairly common among players. If you have one of these stopping and cannot deactivate it while playing this game, you should probably consider a different game.
What if you like to change games? This is no problem so long as you stay in the same denomination. But if you’re playing for quarters and then decide to move up to dollars, your wheel will start over from scratch. Keep in mind, however, that other games on the same machine may well have a different return. They might put a 99.3% Bonus Poker game on the same box as a 97.2% Double Bonus game. Anyone who cares about having a chance to make money should avoid that Double Bonus game no matter what has happened on Bonus Poker.
In the article, the Wizard mentions that playing Triple Play is a smarter bet than Five Play. The reason for this might not be obvious to everybody, so I want to discuss that awhile.
The Build-A-Wheel bonus is based on dealt hands, so how many lines you’re playing doesn’t affect how often the bonus comes around. The bonus itself (99.76%) is worth more than the games it’s being added to.
Let’s take 8-5 Bonus Poker as an example. In Triple Play you add 15 coins of 99.17% to 5 coins of 99.76% and come out with a 20-coin average of 99.32%. In Five Play you add 25 coins of 99.17% to 5 coins of 99.76% and come out with 30 coins of 99.27%.
The highest-returning game Build A Wheel is allowed on (whether or not you will find it at your local casino is a different matter) is NSU Deuces Wild, which returns 99.73% if you play it perfectly. If you did find Build a Wheel on this game, strictly on the mathematics you should probably just play 15 coins for Triple Play or 25 coins for Five Play and avoid paying for the 5-coin bonus. Why? Because adding one piece of 99.76% to three or five pieces of 99.73% gives you a very small increase. If there is any possibility at all that you’ll have to leave before finishing the wheel, that increase would be wiped out.
In the Wizard of Odds write-up (some of which was updated after the majority of this column was written), Shack gives the following advice on surrendering: If you’re playing a bad pay schedule, surrender after getting the first slice. If you’re playing a good pay schedule, never surrender.
I would modify that to be if the only game you can find has a bad pay schedule, don’t play at all. But feel free to watch somebody else play it.