FiliusBruce's Blog

1. Excellent post.



2. Since you show that your results are different than selected published results, may I ask if you have benchmarked your computations against other standard cases, published elsewhere?



3. I suspect that most VP players realize that AH has a lower EV than KH because of fewer ways to make a straight. But you are technically correct that some strategies don't show that explicitly.



I do like the direction you are taking. Thanks for sharing this work.

Quote: gordonm888

2. Since you show that your results are different than selected published results, may I ask if you have benchmarked your computations against other standard cases, published elsewhere?

My code matches the numbers claimed by the Wizard Strategy Maker, as well as the numbers claimed by Video Poker for Winners (VPW). I have code that parses their strategies directly, and I arrive at the same numbers they do (except when VPW messes up their strategy, like listing AH and KQ in the same line in their Jacks 9/5 and 8/5 strategies). But to be fair, those two don't use the exact same format as Dancer & Daily. The Dancer & Daily strategies use a pretty advanced syntax, which is hard to parse automatically, so I've coded in their strategies manually (I'm working on an automatic parser though).



I should also mention that the Dancer & Daily Beginner strategy is very close to the Wizard's simple strategy for 9/6, except that their Beginner strategy holds AKQJ and KQJ, while the Wizard's doesn't (and the Wizard's mentions holding HH when dealt AHH). So they should be pretty close, and the Wizard is claiming a 99.46% return on his, so their return cannot be too different. I show 99.4748% for the upper bound of their Beginner strategy (when preferring KH and QJ over AH), which matches that expectation.



(And thanks a lot for the encouragement!)

The second post, analyzing Dancer and Daily's 8/5 Bonus strategy is now available at:

https://blog.vidpoke.com/2021/08/evaluating-dancer-8-5-bonus-poker-card.html