Pick a Pair DDB

Does anyone know of a video poker strategy generator that will make a strategy for this game? As Video Poker for Winners does not have Pick a Pair, no other software package I have found allows you to account for the different payout between the nines or better (5) and the jacks or better (10) in customizing the paytable to generate the strategy. I even went are far as to dust off my old version of Frugal Video Poker and Video Poker Strategy Master and that couldn't do it as you could not edit the paytable ranks (as in VPW). Any thoughts?

The Pick a Pair decision (discarding one of two cards when you see four cards, then get 2 more cards) is very different than the Video Poker decisions. I'm not surprised that conventional video poker strategy generators can't handle it.

There is a posted generic strategy for Pick a Pair here but I find it confusing/incomprehensible at points -and it is not optimized for the DDB payout tables.

However, this is a relatively easy game to generate a strategy for, using either a looping code or Excel to list all the relevant hands. (Pick a Pair is a 6-card game with one 'either/or' decision on the discard - and there's all sorts of suit folding one can use to reduce the number of hands.)

If you're lucky, maybe the Wizard or CharliePatrick or one of the other gaming mathematicians will develop and post a strategy (I'm too busy for the next couple of weeks.)

Quote: gordonm888

However, this is a relatively easy game to generate a strategy for, using either a looping code or Excel to list all the relevant hands. (Pick a Pair is a 6-card game with one 'either/or' decision on the discard - and there's all sorts of suit folding one can use to reduce the number of hands.)

Not quite as easy as it sounds to put into a "pencil & paper" strategy.

Even without taking specific suits into account, there are 169 different pairs of dealt cards (i.e. the two face-up cards you keep); 13 pairs, 78 where both are the same suit, and 78 where they are two different suits and not a pair.

For just the pairs, I count 469 different pairs of cards where you choose one - for example, if you are dealt As Ah:
1 - Ac Ad
12 - other pair, and both cards match the dealt suits (e.g. 2s 2h, 3s 3h, and so on through Ks Kh)
12 - other pair, and one card matches the dealt suits (e.g. 2s 2c, 3s 3c, and so on through Ks Kc)
12 - other pair, and neither card matches the dealt suits (e.g. 2c 2d through Kc Kd)
66 - suited, and the suit is in the dealt pair (e.g. 2s 3s, 2s 4s, 2s 5s, and so on through Qs Ks)
66 - suited, but the suit is not in the dealt pair (e.g. 2c 3c, 2c 4c, and so on through Qc Kc)
12 - one Ace, and the other card is in one of the dealt suits (e.g. Ac 2s, Ac 3s, and so on through Ac Ks)
12 - one Ace, and the other card is the same suit as the "third" Ace (e.g. Ac 2c through Ac Kc)
12 - one Ace, and the other card is in neither the dealt suits nor the third Ace suit (e.g. Ac 2d through Ac Kd)
66 - not paired, no Aces, and both cards are in the dealt suits (e.g. 2s 3h through Qs Kh)
66 - not paired, no Aces, and the high card is in a dealt suit (e.g. 2c 3s through Qc Ks)
66 - not paired, no Aces, and the low card is in a dealt suit (e.g. 2s 3c through Qs Kc)
66 - not paired, no Aces, and neither card is in a dealt suit (e.g. 2c 3d through Qc Kd)

And I haven't even mentioned when you're not dealt a pair.

Quote: Simon23

Does anyone know of a video poker strategy generator that will make a strategy for this game? As Video Poker for Winners does not have Pick a Pair, no other software package I have found allows you to account for the different payout between the nines or better (5) and the jacks or better (10) in customizing the paytable to generate the strategy. I even went are far as to dust off my old version of Frugal Video Poker and Video Poker Strategy Master and that couldn't do it as you could not edit the paytable ranks (as in VPW). Any thoughts?

I know you want to figure this out. I would like to see you figure it out. But is there a use for it? I have the game at a local casino and I think the paytable was too low even if I could figure out how to play. It wasn't practical for me. Looked interesting, though.

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Quote: Simon23

Does anyone know of a video poker strategy generator that will make a strategy for this game? As Video Poker for Winners does not have Pick a Pair, no other software package I have found allows you to account for the different payout between the nines or better (5) and the jacks or better (10) in customizing the paytable to generate the strategy. I even went are far as to dust off my old version of Frugal Video Poker and Video Poker Strategy Master and that couldn't do it as you could not edit the paytable ranks (as in VPW). Any thoughts?

This is an old thread, but maybe the OP is still interested in the game.

Is this the pay table for your DDD game? My personal VP analyzer can handle 'Nine or Better' (90B) pay tables.


My analyzer processes the input pay table in order of lowest pay to highest pay. This means I first assign any hand better than a pair of nines with a 9OB payoff, then I assign any hand better than a pair of jacks with a JOB payoff, overwriting the original pay value. This is how I handle multiple pair payoffs in the same game.

I actually analyze the game as if it was a joker wild game. I use my ordinary VP analysis loop, except that I ignore all hands that do not contain a joker. Then, I only look at the 3-card holds that do not include a joker. This gives me all of the EVs that I need to analyze this game. Consider the hand Jh Qh 9s 8d Joker. There are six ways of comparing 3-card holds that do not contain a joker:

In the first row, I compare hold #7 with hold # 11. You cans see that the common cards [A-B] are [JhQh], which means the pickem choice [C-D] is between [9s8d]. The EV of picking 9s is 0.96 versus 0.69 for picking 8d. (As an example of my hold numbering, the decimal number 14 expressed as a five digit binary number is 01110, so my hold #14 selects the middle three cards from the dealt hand.)

I came up with this joker-wild trick myself. It allows me to repurpose almost all of the code that I wrote to analyze standard 5-card draw VP games to analyze the 4-card pickem game. I simply need to use a different normalization factor, since only 1,624,350 distinct ways to deal a pickem hand versus 2,869,685 ways to deal a joker-wild hand.


If you have a commercial VP analyzer that allows you to set the payoff of 9OB and TOB hands separately from JOB hands within a joker wild game, you can probably get all of these EVs printed out in a hand analysis. This would allow you to build your own strategy table for pickem even if your program does does not offer pickem games as an option.

I still have a commercial VP program I bought from Dean Zamzow in 1997. It allows me to set 9OB payoffs, but not separate JOB payoffs and I cannot define custom games with wild cards. It has not pickem option.

The closest I could come to analyzing a pickem game in Dean's program is to define a non-wildcard game with the classic pickem pay table 2-3-5-11-15-18-120-240-1200. Then, if I enter the hand Jh Qh 9s 8d 2c, I get all the information I need to decide these six possible pickem choices. The EVs are off a bit because I am drawing from a 47 card stub that does not contain a 2c. If Dean's program allowed me to define 9OB payoffs in a wild card game, the EVs would have been exact because I would be drawing from a 48-card stub.