Play 9/6 JOB strategy on a 8/5 Bonus Machine

Does anyone know what % of H.E. you give up? I'd imagine it's almost negligible.

You'll lose about 0.03%, dropping your return down to 99.14%.

I would pay much more attention to the loss of -0.37% from switching from 9/6 JOB to 8/5 Bonus.

I agree but oftentimes 8/5 Bonus is the best game available at many casinos.

Thanks for the reply.

Quote: teddys

...I'd imagine it's almost negligible.

If you use the combinations from the Wizard of Odds' 9-6 Jacks or Better return table with the payouts for 8/5 Bonus Poker, you'll get a return of 0.99109, which is worse than the optimal return of 0.99166 by 0.00057. So you're right, the difference is almost negligible.

Quote: ChesterDog

If you use the combinations from the Wizard of Odds' 9-6 Jacks or Better return table with the payouts for 8/5 Bonus Poker, you'll get a return of 0.99109, which is worse than the optimal return of 0.99166 by 0.00057.

this is fallacious because not all quads occur with identical frequency. you can't just replace 25 with (25*9 + 40*3 + 80)/13 in the paytable and get a correct answer. (interesting try, though - i knew the result was wrong, but it took me a few moments to realize what was wrong with the reasoning.)

quad jacks through aces occur more frequently than quad deuces through tens, since you more often hold high pairs than low pairs, and high singletons turn into quads on rare occasions while you never hold low singletons. this makes the return for bonus poker significantly better than you suggest, since quad aces are so important and you're undercounting them.

strategy chart return for 8/5 BP is 99.1643%, about 0.002% worse than optimal because of penalty card situations and such. using the strategy chart for 9/6 JoB lowers this to 99.1613%, a drop of about 0.003%. (these numbers are from Frugal Video Poker, but i've seen similar numbers quoted elsewhere.)

i wouldn't consider 0.06% negligible, but 0.003% is small enough that i've never bothered to learn proper 8/5 BP strategy despite playing millions of coinin on it.

Quote: fivespot

Quote: ChesterDog

If you use the combinations from the Wizard of Odds' 9-6 Jacks or Better return table with the payouts for 8/5 Bonus Poker, you'll get a return of 0.99109, which is worse than the optimal return of 0.99166 by 0.00057.

you can't just replace 25 with (25*9 + 40*3 + 80)/13 in the paytable and get a correct answer.

No, but you can use the Java analyzer to come up with the correct answer. Set it up for Bonus Poker, set flush to 30, FH to 45, and all quads to 125, and you get the same combinations and probabilities as 9-6 JoB, only split by the type of quads. Plugging those probabilities into the 8-5 Bonus paytable results in a return of 99.1582%, vs. 99.1660% for the perfect 8-5 strategy, for an EV loss of 0.0077%.

Of course, this doesn't account for inaccuracies in strategy sheets, but I'd guess that the Wizard's Optimal 9-6 JoB has a smaller EV loss than the 8-5 Bonus, which will help make up for the "improper" strategy.

Good information, thanks.