Dreamcard vs Bonus Wild VP

Avid VP player here, but new to this forum. I know I must be missing something, so somebody please help me understand:

Why isn't Bonus Wild VP a much better EV proposition than Dreamcard?

The Dreamcard and Bonus Wild card are dealt with similar frequencies.

Dreamcard you get the card of your choice, but it is fixed once you draw.
Bonus Wild you get a completely wild card.

Every time you draw to quads, royals, etc in Dreamcard, you have to catch the exact card.
When you draw to those in Bonus Wild, you can hit one of two cards to complete your hand. You also have the added possibility of hitting 5 of a kind, which pays better than a royal.

This seems like a no-brainer. But I saw someone do the EV analysis for Bonus Wild (DDB) and it came out to be only slightly better than Dreamcard.

That can't be right. I'm sure I must be missing something obvious. Hopefully someone can tell me what it is.

(I'm relatively new to this site, so I'm sorry if this has already been discussed in a thread and I didn't see it. Thanks!)

I don't know if your question is answered, but here are some relevant links anyway:

https://wizardofvegas.com/forum/gambling/video-poker/38915-bonus-wild-video-poker/#post917322

https://wizardofodds.com/games/video-poker/tables/dream-card/


My feeling is that on any premium hand, a wild card offering the best possible substitution or a dream card offering the best possible substitution should be very close in value. Both games seem to be bet 10 to get a 5 coin paytable plus the bonus feature.

Thank you, Dieter! I had seen the Wizard of Odds analysis of Dreamcard. Specifically, the 8/5 DDB version returns 97.5%.

Here is the analysis someone else did for Bonus Wild poker:

www.vegasmessageboard.com/forums/index.php?threads/bonus-wild-poker-igt-g2e-2021-release-and-ddb-plus-analysis-strategy-for-ddb-players.198310/

And they show a total return of 96.8% for 8/5 DDB on Bonus Wild Poker.

I cannot make sense of that at all!

Let's say you are dealt a pair of aces and a dreamcard. Now you have three aces. You have to specifically draw the fourth ace in the deck to get quads.

If you're playing Bonus Wild, and you get a pair of aces and the Bonus Wild card, you have three aces, but you can pull either of the two remaining aces in the deck to get quads (assuming it's not the rare occasions where the Bonus Wild card replaced an ace). The Bonus Wild card is clearly much more powerful! And the payout is the same! How can it not be a better payback?

As a VP player, this is what keeps me up at night :)

Quote: NumbersGuy

And they show a total return of 96.8% for 8/5 DDB on Bonus Wild Poker.

I cannot make sense of that at all!
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I think you may need to look at the bonus feature frequencies again.

Some players will prefer bigger bonuses less often, some players will prefer smaller bonuses more often.

There are clearly some differences in the substitution mechanism, the drawing rules, and the paytables.

I now see in the analysis done here that the Dreamcard frequency for DDB is listed at 31%. However the most recent machine I played said that the dreamcard frequency was about 1-in-6 (and that is about how often it came out). So am I just getting completely shafted? I assumed Dreamcard frequency was the same across all machines (in a given game variation) but perhaps it isn't. That would explain my puzzlement, since the Bonus Card frequency on Bonus Wild Poker is also about 1-in-6.

This would also mean that the payback on the Dreamcard I saw could be 95% or lower. Sounds pretty shady

I thought I heard Bob Dancer mention in one of the sponsored highlights of Dream Card on GWAE that there were multiple versions of the Dream Card feature, but the RTP% was the same. I would expect the variance to differ.

In any case, doesn't Nevada law disallow return decreasing as wager increases? I would trust that to protect against some misfeature decreasing the theoretical return to less than the base game paytable's.

To clarify what I mean, Dieter...

The analysis of Dreamcard that Wizard of Odds did was based on the Dreamcard appearing 31% of the time for DDB. And maybe that is the default setting for Dreamcard for DDB. But in my most recent trip to Vegas, I definitely played Dreamcard DDB where, in the help menu, the frequency was shown as 1 in every 5-point-something hands. I want to say it was about 1-in-5.5 hands. Which obviously is far below 31%. So while Wizard calculated an overall return of 97.5%, the actual return on my machine was far lower. They didn't change the payouts, but they did change the Dreamcard frequency.

As percentages go, I will give it about a 10% chance that in my advanced age, I saw it completely wrong or otherwise made a mistake of some kind. And I obviously don't want to disparage a given casino without knowing for sure. But I will double check the next time I go back, and take a screenshot to show what I find.

At any rate, that settles my initial question regarding my comparison of Dreamcard vs Bonus Wild Poker. If the frequency of the Dreamcard was intended to be almost twice as high as BWP, then that would explain how they could be comparable in overall return. But obviously, the return on the version of Dreamcard that I saw would be much worse.