RoyallyYours's Blog

Share this: Deceptive game is not +EV

I thought I found the holy grail of video poker: a 105+% return paytable that I could bet $8.25/hand for $500/hour. I would include pics but I don't know how to attach them here.

Specs:
IGT class 3
Ultimate x wheel
3 handed $.25 denom (35 credits per deal)
Base paytable is 105%
Deuces Wild
4000
1000
125
75
50
25
20
15
10
5

I asked Richard Munchkin to help analyze and create a strategy for the game. He referred me his friend who only identified himself as Big Red. I am quoting his conclusion at the end of this post. He is completely right about other games on the console having deceptive paytables as well.

Looking back there were several red flags.
- Betting 4 credits or less had a completely different paytable with 97% return. Why would the game force you to play with the wheel to get the paytable?
6 of the 8 games had 100+% paytables. How likely is it a paytable mistake was made 6 times?
I simply could not win over any length of play over an hour. Is it within expectation to play 30,000 hands and lose $12,000?

Big Red:

With the full picture of the pay table I'm almost certain that this is the DW game listed on the UX Wheel Poker page: Deuces Wild 25-16-13-4-3-2 97.637%, it's just listed by the single-credit payouts instead of showing the "better" payouts you get by playing max & enabling the feature. The feature is not guaranteed to increase the return. A recent example of this is *newer* Dream Card games. Original Dream Card had uniform pay tables and (for JoB/DW) the feature was triggered around 50% of the time. Now the new Dream Card has a very attractive pay table on max bet (which would be over 100% if a regular single line game) but the feature is triggered under 20% of the time, making the overall return below 100% and, in most cases, worse than most original Dream Card variants. You can't play short-coin and get the "good" pay table, which also is likely the case here.

Most machines usually have games set to relatively similar returns, so I would guess that most games, including the other DW Bonus game all return under 98%. Look at the single-credit payouts for that and compare it to what's listed on WoO. Sometimes a machine has an abnormally high returning game, but my prediction is that the DW Bonus game you have found will pay 12-4-3-2 for single-credit, and I would be very shocked if it wasn't one of the three pay tables listed on WoO.