Silly Made Up Hands

You may or may not be familiar with GuaranteedPlay.com, but it's a site where you can try out the buy hands in bulk video poker. When you press the space bar while playing (a common key command for deal), a screen comes up with various programming functions. One of these is the ability to program the series of cards coming up. You just press a string of various cards, then close the window, hit deal.

I came up with some weird ones.

4 Jokers and a Jack makes a royal flush in Jacks or Better:



5 Deuces counts as 4 Deuces with an Ace in Deuces Wild Bonus Poker:



As you can imagine, you can program your dream game of video poker. Or, if you like, you can manually click a bunch of random cards, although it seems to ignore what's already on the screen when you select "random" suit. Which leads to things like two Jacks of Clubs.

I went back to the site to copy the URL and it seems to be down. I hope I didn't break it, as I imagine this wasn't intended for players to fool around with. For casinos if anything, but hey, it was public.

Here you can play Gauranteed Play. Press the space bar on the game screen for the programming function.

And here of course is the Wizard's analysis for Guaranteed Play.

Yes, I am familiar with Guaranteed Play from Walker Digital. I am a proud employee and dealer with Station Casinos, and Stations gave it its VERY best shot to take off, and in good faith, totally believing in the product, and making a large bet on its success. The crash and burn was painful for us all, being totally frank about the experiment.

The goal of video Poker is to not see or play "silly hands," - it is to win on rare hands, sometimes called or considered "silly"....actually quite close.
You mention Guarenteed play also. A very big and rare experiement in the gaming industry. Not silly, but serious...

Stations launched it a few years ago with great and loud fanfare, as the very next thing "really really hot" thing in video play. It's a system where a player is guarenteed to have a certain number of "guarenteed" hands to play, not matter how he does. Sounds great, right?

BUT the player - AFTER depositing 'X' number of dollars or units such twenty dollars - starts at an absolute ZERO credit balance, and goes "up OR down" from there, [good luck, buddy] with a guarentee of getting to play 20 hands, the player gets 20 units of play or "units to be played." If he does NOT hit a streak or a large payout very quickly, he not only sees his credit unit tally go into the negative on the machine (thinking "What!! I OWE the casino money AFTER buying in??!! - a VERY bad thing), but he CANNOT cash out at all. He either surrenders his credit/cash balance with NO cashout ticket to redeem, or he watches himself go broke to face his humiliating fate - if he does not hit a large streak or big hand right off the bat, - almost always the case. If he hits a four of a kind near his last hand, seeing himself "go into the plus" for his only moment during the session, he cashes out straight away, in order to lock in his only shot at a "Guaranteed Profit," and would always do so, so to speak. Totally against the nature of the gamblers, and was missed totally.

In theory, the idea seemed very beautiful and novel - "Now how can you lose - when You Are Guarenteed Your Full Session??!@!"

In practice, all slot and VP players hated the shit out of it, and abandoned it to the point that an "alleyway abortion is indistinguishable to an alleyway still birth," - just a horrifyingly thud in a mortuary. In terms of the action, the silence was howling pain, the little action seen was simply "You LOSE or YOU RUN with ANY profit you can get." That's what it trained the few players to do who played it.

Our cocktail waitresses seriously protested after the first week - "Don't assign me to the GP slot area - because I'm not serving drinks to ghosts, now, I've got a mortage and car payments here, I'll f*cking transfer to Sunset or Green Valley Ranch!..." And these ladies were not joking, as they were the front guard of the pushback on this.

Believe you me, the cocktail waitresses are the Eyes and Ears of the slot department, and any slot or Casino manager who doesn't know this is just not listening to his front-line workers who know the real deal...

Jay Walker saw something great in Guarenteed Play, in the sense that well, "- you PAY for a gambling outing, the you're Entitled to it...." He did an inspiring video on "its merits as to why it HAS to succeed," much in the same way that the Ford Family had once pronounced the Ford Edsel as "The Bomb - for us all." They were acting in very fine faith and belief in their predictions, and were absolutely correct about the bomb part.

In this regard, there is a LOT to be said for the merits of focus groups, professional review, and field trials - as NO ONE is a guru or industry dictator, as sales, merit and performance are indicated by..well, sales, merit, and performance....This is because Very few regular casino executives are a Bill Gates or Lee Iacocca who can state "this WILL INDEED sell..." Maybe Steve Wynn.

Some Gaming distributors select a very few thoroughly researched products (DEQ with G3/EZ Baccarat)...or release a LOT of varied products, then promote the several clear winners (Gaming Network, or Shufflemaster with Three Card Poker and their shuffling machines, and Roger Snow designing worthy and succesful games.) Casino operators do know less of the risks and merits involved in a "Large Naked Launching" of some gaming product than Game distributors do, simply because it's not the operators job to gamble, as that is their job of providing to their customers. Distributors gamble on the operators' behalf, a lesson from this.

The whole Guarenteed Play episode with Stations was just one fantastic slot experiment and gamble, hit or miss, huge success and learning either way.

Their hand calculator seems to be working well. Mine was giving me fits with two decks. Thank goodness that's resolved.

Quote: jakesorbetter

5 Deuces counts as 4 Deuces with an Ace in Deuces Wild Bonus Poker.

That's odd. Would four deuces and an Ace be a Royal?

For what it's worth, I do not "get it" at all. You can create winning hands? That doesn't make sense.

I was going to try it, but the link doesn't work for me. I get a blank screen.

Quote: Paigowdan

Our cocktail waitresses seriously protested after the first week - "Don't assign me to the GP slot area - because I'm not serving drinks to ghosts, now, I've got a mortage and car payments here, I'll f*cking transfer to Sunset or Green Valley Ranch!..." And these ladies were not joking, as they were the front guard of the pushback on this.

Funny, the only place I saw these, about 4 years ago, was at Green Valley Ranch, and NOBODY was playing them. I worked on the testing the GP games, and I hated them from the very start. The plan was to have pokers, slots, you name it and it was supposed to be the next great change to gaming.

On the original games, you would see your credit balance go negative, and the player was left feeling like they were climbing out of a hole.

I like the idea of it in table games (I think Club Fortune has GP tables?), but I don't see how it would work in slots.

I always wanted to try the Guranteed Play machines. Seemed like an interesting idea, at least.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

That's odd. Would four deuces and an Ace be a Royal?

Sorry for the tangent, but years ago, in college, we had a poker playing group that met once a week. We played standard games, but we also played a lot of the made up games with tons of wild cards. Initially, we figured that if you ended up with 5 wild cards in your hand, then you had the best hand possible, whatever that might be. (5 of a kind, straight flush, whatever) However, we then decided that the wild cards needed *something* in order to make then into a hand. We didn't know about Paigow Poker at the time (if it existed then), but it's similar to the idea of the Joker in that game. The Joker can complete a straight, or a flush, or a straight flush, otherwise it's an ace. We just said that wild cards could complete a hand, but otherwise they are just nothing.

So, someone who ended up with 5 wild cards, effectively had nothing. But someone with 4 wild cards and an Ace, had 5-of a kind aces, or a straight flush if that was considered better for that particular game. I know it sounds silly to consider 5 wild cards to be nothing, but it did make for some interesting situations in which a person with, let's say, 4 wild cards and a 3, might drop the 3 in hopes of getting a higher 5 of a kind, and instead draw a wild card and end up with nothing. Maybe it added another element of strategy to our games. Or else we were all just drunk and didn't care.

Quote: Paigowdan

The goal of video Poker is to not see or play "silly hands," - it is to win on rare hands, sometimes called or considered "silly"....actually quite close.
You mention Guarenteed play also. A very big and rare experiement in the gaming industry. Not silly, but serious...

Stations launched it a few years ago with great and loud fanfare, as the very next thing "really really hot" thing in video play. It's a system where a player is guarenteed to have a certain number of "guarenteed" hands to play, not matter how he does. Sounds great, right?

I apologize for the misunderstanding, but my pictures were intended as Video Poker humor. Kind of like how a computer programmer might wear a shirt that says something written out in 1s and 0s. It amuses me given the way this particular application interprets the cards, 4 Jokers and one Jack of Clubs makes a Royal Flush. If you were dealt 4 Jokers there would be a 20 in 47 chance that you could get a Royal Flush on the draw. (Granted this is based on the JoB pay table, Jokers do not belong in this game, nor is there an alternative wild royal flush payout.

I assure you, I do not sit at the VP machine wasting money trying to achieve silly hands, the ones I posted aren't even possible.

It sucks that your casino (and others) had poor luck on the game investment. On the site itself, the balance does not go negative, it remains at zero even when you lose. I still found it uncommon to overcome the original price, but by cashing out whenever my bankroll was equal to or above the original price of the remaining hands, I was actually able to sustain, and eventually hit 4 deuces on a $1 game. The logic behind cashing out is that the value of your Bankroll is higher than that of free hands. (your normal bet on 8/5 Jacks is only worth 97.3%)

Anyways, I think the concept could be modified in a way that makes it a fun, challenging game with a fair payout. When the game doesn't go below zero, a one betting unit return is worthless unless its your last hand. How do you account for that? Is the math different when you consider a 40 credit full house to be 1:7? Do you calculate garbage as 5 credits of your return, like you would with a pair of Jacks? Which would you keep: a pair of Jacks, or 4 to a Flush? You're no better off being dealt 2 Jacks than you are with 2 Tens. Either way, after you have your next hand dealt, the credit meter will be at zero.

Hence, it's a different strategy: a more complicated one. Given the added difficulty, plus the large upfront cost investment, the game could afford a higher payout percentage. Unfortunately, people who don't make use of the more in depth strategy will probably be very upset and think it's a scam. Silly? No.

.....

Quote: gofaster87

Wow, Guaranteed play. That was the biggest flop in history. A bunch of us that play poker regularly along with a couple pros called it well before they installed it. Not sure what brainiac thought that would actually work.

Nah, the adventures of Pluto Nash... that was the biggest flop in history,....