Dream Card Strategy Question

I was playing 5 hand Dream card DDB and was on fire and decided I would freeroll $100 on DW, which is a pretty bad game on there. Anyway, it dealt me Td Jd Qd 2 and the dream card was a 2. Deuces royal paid 100 credits, natural royal paid 4000. I stood for my 500 credits. Was the correct play to change the dream card to Kd and go for the natural royal? I have noticed it does not always give the best dream card and wondered if this was one of those times.

The best Deuces Wild paytable for Dream Card pays 125 coins for a wild royal, and all others pay 100 coins.

Discarding the deuce from KQJT/2 has an ER of 97.234 coins at best, so the wild royal is the better play, even if it only pays 100 coins.

That's not to say that you still shouldn't keep an eye on the card it picks as the Dream Card. It only happened to me once when playing for real money (i.e. not on VideoPoker.com), but I did encounter a wrong choice on 9/6 Double Double Bonus. The first four cards were 3-5-8-10 rainbow, and it paired the 5 instead of the 3. This was on the Dream Card machine they had at Ellis Island a couple years ago; I don't know if they still have it. Casinos don't seem to like Dream Card very much, probably because of the increased frequency of handpays.

Thanks for the reply,

That same day, it made a similar mistake on DDB. It was a ten high board of crap like 459T and it paired the ten instead of the 4. I changed it.

I was surprised by another play it made in DDB. 642 suited with an unmatched ace. The dream card was the 3 to give a sf gutshot, instead of another ace. I decided to play it the way it was dealt, and hit the 5 for sf twice in five hands.

I can see why casinos hate that game. The variance is insane, and if you are betting on quarters the paytables are on the better end. I only know of the game at Red Rock and Suncoast, and Suncoast recently went down to just three machines. Red Rock has 7 I believe, but three of them are $.25 or higher.

With 246/A, it was right to pick the 3 of spades (or if it had, the 5 of spades instead) because the ER with suited 2346 or 2456 and tossing an Ace is 11.7 coins per hand, versus 9.5 coins per hand with AA and tossing the suited 246 (assuming 9/6 DDB).

Do you know what paytable they have for Deuces Wild at either place? I'd love to find the 1-2-3-4-4-9-15-25-200-800 paytable on Dream Card; it returns over 99.9%.

VideoPoker.com says the following casinos have Dream Card 3/5/10 play machines:

Harrah's
M Resort
Monte Carlo
Rampart
Santa Fe Station
Suncoast

And that the following casinos have both 3/5/10-play and Spin Poker machines:

Bellagio
Circus Circus
Mandalay Bay
MGM Grand
Orleans
Red Rock

The DW pay table was bad at RR. I only played it for the fun of it because the dream card comes up twice as much in DW iirc, and I as up a bunch. 2's Royal was 20, 5oak 12, sf 10. It was the "Deuces Wild - 97.58%" paytable on WOO. This was on $.25, the pay table might even be worse on nickel or dime. The other games usually are.

If it's any consolation, the Dream Card feature boosts the return for the 20/12/10 paytable from 97.58% to about 98.1%.