One of the casinos I play at is Dotty’s, which is a chain of more than 100 15-machine outlets all across Nevada, plus a few larger ones. There are perhaps 10 of them within 10 miles of my home.
One of the promotions that attracts me relates to W2Gs. Every week, 10% of the W2Gs earned company-wide earn a 10% bonus. That is, if you receive a $4,000 royal flush, 10% of the time you receive an additional $400 in cash. I estimate the value of that by assuming I’ll get an extra $40 for every such jackpot. (in other words, $40 every time adds up to the same number as $400 10% of the time.) I’ll end up with the same EV, although I’ll be underestimating the variance a little.
My game of choice currently is 9/5 Super Double Bonus. If I play that game for at least $25 per hand, I’ll get W2Gs for all quads as well as for each straight flush and royal flush.
I’ve known the strategy for that game for some time and I’ve written about it periodically. The question I’m looking at today and next week is: Does the strategy change with the Dotty’s promotion? And if so, what are those changes? Further, assume that I’m not a computer programmer and I don’t have access to computer software that you don’t. So how do I go about this?
I wish to learn to play the game perfectly. I understand that this may not be your goal. Still, learning how to do it is what this week’s and next week’s columns are all about. Someday there may well be a promotion that you wish to figure out.
The software I’m going to use for this analysis is the Wizard of Odds (WOO) Video Poker Strategy Calculator. It will give you a perfect strategy and it’s available for free online. Although I’m not a huge fan of the notation used on that product, it’s hard to complain too loudly when it’s free and completely accurate.
For the base game, the pay schedule is 800, 80, 160, 120, 80, 50, 9, 5, 4, 3, 1, 1 Adding 1% to each of the top six figures will make the return on one of them 50.5. Although the WOO software does accept decimal points, I prefer to multiply all of the amounts by 10. That is 8000, 800, 1600, etc. Since the strategy is calculated using relative values, multiplying all pay schedule categories by a fixed amount has no effect whatsoever on the strategy.
For the Dotty’s version, I enter the payout amounts as 8080, 808, 1616, 1212, 808, 505, 90, 50, 40, 30, 10, 10. The lowest six pay schedule categories don’t receive the 1% increase because they don’t result in W2Gs. If I wanted to bet $134 or more per single-line hand, I could get W2Gs on full houses as well. For today we can ignore that refinement.
In the chart below, the numbers in red indicate numbers for the base 9/5 SDB game. The numbers in green represent the numbers for the Dotty’s version.
The actual chart created by the WOO software has several more columns to it that I’ve omitted here. If you duplicate either the red or green Payoff numbers in the WOO Video Poker Strategy Calculator, you’ll see the omitted columns. Those columns include useful information, but not information we’re using today. If you don’t duplicate this information yourself, how do you know if you can do it? It’s not difficult, but “practice makes perfect.” If you don’t know how to use a tool, it’s the same as not having the tool at all.
In the red section of the chart, find the number 490,732,320. That’s the number of occurrences for royal flushes out of 19,933,230,517,200. (In a recent Gambling with an Edge episode, Michael Shackleford explained where this number comes from.) In the green section, the corresponding number is 491,575,464.
That means that when you change strategies to take advantage of these W2G bonuses, you get more royals. You should be able to see you also get more straight flushes, more aces, more 2s-4s, and more 5s-Ts. For some reason I’ll explain next week, you get fewer Js-Ks.
Okay. Now I know there are strategy changes. This is the first part of what I wanted to know. I now need to find out what these changes are.
I’m going to tell you what those changes are — next week. I’m going to use the WOO Video Poker Strategy Calculator to do this. What I strongly recommend is that you work this out yourself. All the information you need is in the software which is online and free. As I said before, if you don’t know how to use a tool, it’s the same as not having the tool at all.
