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Video Poker Highway To Hell

Discussion in 'Video Poker Forum' started by Frank Kneeland, Mar 3, 2015.

  1. Frank Kneeland

    Frank Kneeland Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    The following is from an article I wrote for Blackjack Insider and pertains to how a high intelligence and good pattern recognition can actually hurt you rather than help in the world of video poker.

    Highway to Hell Part 1:

    There was no question as to the intelligent design of the canals of Mars. The only question was, "Which side of the telescope that intelligence was on?" Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

    Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Blues for a Red Planet) (summarized)

    Imagine you are travelling down a road with "adopt a highway" mile markers posted every mile, stating which families are responsible for the upkeep of each segment of the highway. You notice as you travel down the highway the following:

    Mile one, belonging to the Robinson family, is clean.

    Mile two, belonging to the Smith family, is dirty.

    Mile three, belonging to the Mortensen family, is spotless.

    Mile four, belonging to the Curmudgeon family, is filthy.

    And so on...

    Almost every person on the planet, including me, would at first conclude that the Mortensen family must have their act together, and the Curmudgeon family (as well as having a ridiculous name) must be dropping the ball. This might even be a true conclusion; however, the markers provide some information, incomplete and misleading though it may be. Consider that we are making this dogmatic judgment about family performance without the slightest inclusion of the random distribution of trash along the road. This common mental deficit in nearly all humans is related to the phenomenon know as "The base rate fallacy," or "base rate neglect." The families who have adopted a stretch of highway are responsible for cleaning; however, they are not the ones making the mess. The random distribution of trash by littering travelers is by far the more important piece of information required to make a sound judgment about the true cause of trash placement along the route. However, this information is neither provided nor available. Therefore, as the flawed beings that we are, our minds fill in the blanks with what is available, which in this case turns out to be the same thing scattered about our mythical highway...garbage.

    Now that you should have the basic idea, let's add to it and make the analogy even more applicable to video poker.

    Highway to Hell Part 2:

    Now imagine you are traveling down a lonely road that was the target of college hazing by the well-known fraternity Delta Iota Kappa (DIK for short). Prospective members had to plant "adopt a highway" mile markers every mile on a stretch of unmaintained road, with either made-up names, or the names of the school's staff. You then travel down this route, with completely random distributions of trash, where the mile markers are contrived and literally tell you less than nothing... and notice that:

    Mile one, belonging to Dean Smith, is boring and bald.

    Mile two, belonging to Professor Cully, is dirty and smelly.

    Mile three, belonging to the Dickless family, is spotless and flat.

    Mile four, belonging to the Bush family, is filthy and disorganized.

    And so on... (No offence to anyone real is intended.)

    Now it is the time for introspection and honesty. Assuming you knew nothing of the ruse, can you really tell me you wouldn't draw any conclusion whatsoever about the names printed on the signs, or at least, after seeing the state of their mile, suspect possible negligence on the part of the Bush Family,???..???

    Of course, you would. We all would! It is human nature. However, here is the real point: THERE ARE NO MILE MARKERS. It is one continuous stretch of unmaintained road, which simply has imaginary lines of demarcation that force our minds down one-way dead end streets. This is the very sophomoric prank we play on our own minds every time we change video poker machines, leave a casino, go to sleep and get up, alter strategy on a hunch, put on a different sweater, etc. ... ad infinitum. Anything that could possibly be used as a way-point in our thoughts to measure success or failure between "here---and---there" will be grasped by our subconscious and used to fool us. Random events have no patterns beyond the ones we create in our own minds that is the very definition of random, "Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective". It would be fine to see if there was a correlation between stormy weather and the time of year. But seeing if the last digit in our Gregorian calendar also effected the occurrence of storms would be ludicrous, since numerical dates are imposed human constructs, and we can only hope in our heart of hearts that Hurricane Harry doesn't know it's the 3rd of February and choose to strike New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

    Looking for patterns isn't always a bad idea, but we just don't know when to leave well enough alone.

    The only way to win is not to play the game.

    ~War Games
     
    VegasGalPoker likes this.
  2. Dan Paymar

    Dan Paymar Active Member Founding Member

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    Most humans tend to look for patterns in a sequence of events. Everyone sees cloud formations that resemble some animal or face; most realize that it's just random chance, but a few people may think that some higher power intentionally created that formation.

    About 20 years ago there was a study of this tendency. A test was set up with two lights, green and red, that were flashed randomly except it was biased so the red light appeared 60% of the time. The object was to push one of two buttons to guess which light would flash next. Nearly all human subjects tried to predict the next light, and they scored about 50%.

    Then they tried the same test with rats, giving a bit of food when the rat got it right. Most rats soon began always picking the red light every time, thus scoring 60%. They reversed the bias, and it didn't take long for the rat to switch to always selecting the green light, again scoring 60%.

    Conclusion? Rats are better than humans at detecting a bias within random events and are not affected by apparent patterns where there are none.
     
    Frank Kneeland likes this.
  3. Mark V

    Mark V Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    In my recent trip to LV, I saw quite a few players tracking VP hands and machines. My guess is that they are looking for a machine that is 'looser' or more likely to produce winning hands over non-winning hands. Or, are they looking for a machine where 'random' is predictable??

    I know that when it comes to computers, Random is not always the same. For example a windows random function will run bias to one side or the other while the same function in Linux will run more evenly distributed. This is due to how Random is determined - noise in the background or though voltage variations.

    There are also some cases where due to how a CPU and motherboard is build, RANDOM IS THE SAME OVER AND OVER! This was the case a while back with a Keno machine where turned off then back on, the keno draws would be the same from the last time it was powered off and back on.

    My guess is that is is possible due to age and other factors that a Video Poker Machine may go bias in the players favor due to its random determination factor going wonky.

    I have no idea how often the Slot techs change out VP machine components to prevent biases. My guess is that they don't unless it is absolutely malfunctioning.

    I think that the casinos know that a machine can go bias on them, that is why they move them around or even swap out boards periodically. If a player finds a machine that is favorable, they may win one day and come back the next thinking that they will be playing a favorable machine only to find that late at night the techs swapped out the board for another, and now they are playing an unbiased machine - and lose.

    Nothing is truly random. Baccarat players will tell you that a 8 deck shoe will have biases, blackjack players absolutely will tell you that a shoe of cards will have a bias. The skill here is to know when that bias shifts towards the players and to capitalize on it. Other games like craps and roulette can pick up biases though wear and tear, or just by the casinos own neglect and buying of inferior dice and wheels. Sometimes these biases can be in favor of the players or greatly against them.

    All a person needs to be is observant to find the biases in any game. Those biases may be subtle where it makes little difference to beat house edge, or they may be significant enough to give the player a hefty advantage over the house.
     
  4. Frank Kneeland

    Frank Kneeland Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    They actually replicated this test more recently and the rats got closer to 72%, with 75% being a perfect score. The humans again got 50% or less and even when told how the test worked and that it was random, several of the participants insisted on being allowed to keep trying because, "THEY ALMOST HAD IT FIGURED OUT"...
     
  5. Frank Kneeland

    Frank Kneeland Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    And 99.99% of those players telling you they've figured out a pattern are seeing faces in the clouds just as Dan stated.

    Unless you are using an advanced computerised shuffle tracking algorithm decks of cards and VP machines are as random as they need to be unpredictable and equiprobable...

    While I agree that true randomness is difficult to achieve, unpredictable and equiprobable isn't unattainable and modern VP machines do it quite well. And when we say, "random" this is what we mean.

    Think like a rat you'll be better off on the whole...
     
  6. Frank Kneeland

    Frank Kneeland Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    If you start thinking that there are patterns in the random results of VP machines you will find them, even if they aren't real. It's a dangerous path to traverse and will lead you only to a bad end...
     
  7. Dan Paymar

    Dan Paymar Active Member Founding Member

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    On another forum some months ago, someone wrote:
    "What the machine does when you hit deal is to select a number that has been mapped to a card. Then it selects the second card and it tests to see if it has been displayed, if not it then displays the card; if yes, it selects another card, tests and then displays if not previously
    displayed. It does this three more times until it has five cards."

    When I was first developing Optimum Video Poker I tried exactly this method of dealing, but before using it in the program I ran the results through several common procedures that statisticians use to test for randomness. The results were terrible! I think the problem is that after the first card there is one chance in 52 that the RNG will pick that same card again and have to reject it. When picking the fifth card, there are four chances in 52 of picking one of the first four cards, and of course this can happen again after rejecting that card. Thus, several of the RNG's outputs are often skipped, and it's even worse when picking draw cards. I was not able to get this method to produce random hands.

    On a suggestion from Jazbo, I switched to shuffling the deck repeatedly during the idle time between hands. The shuffling method is as follows. The RNG generates a number from 1 to 52, and the card at that position is exchanged with the first card in the deck. Another random card is then exchanged with the second cards in the deck. When each of the 52 cards has been exchanged with a card in a random position, the deck has been shuffled. All of this takes less than one millisecond, and the deck is shuffled repeatedly until the user presses a Bet button. At that point, the deck is frozen, and all the cards are dealt off the top of the deck, just as if shuffling and dealing from a real deck of cards. This method produces results that are accepted by the statisticians' tests as truly random.

    According to a programmer I know who used to work at IGT, this is essentially how most casino machines do it, although newer machines may resume shuffling the remaining 47 cards after the deal. If the machines selected "random" cards as suggested by the writer above, there very likely would be detectable patterns that a player could use to be a big winner.

    Dan
    --
    Dan Paymar, developer of "Optimum Video Poker" software
    "Chance favors the prepared mind" ~ Louis Pasteur
     

  8. Dan Paymar

    Dan Paymar Active Member Founding Member

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    I think you're referring to the live keno game as a casino in Canada (Windsor?). The keno numbers were selected by a random number generator in a computer. The law required that casinos close at 2:00 AM and not reopen until 6:00 AM, or something like that, so each night the computers were shut off, then restarted in the morning. The problem was that each morning the keno RNG started with the same seed number, so every game was identical to the day before. One player noticed that and got a 20 out of 20 hit, then a day or so later a 19 out of 20 hit. When asked, he said something about using chaos theory, then finally admitted how he had done it. He got paid, and the keno game was changed. I don't know exactly what they did, but I would have used something like the date and time as the seed. Since the computer was started up by a human, there would be no way to start at exactly the same time every day. Even a millisecond difference would result in a different random number sequence. But instead of just using the random numbers as the result, I would shuffle an 80-card "deck" repeatedly, then use the first 20 numbers for the game. Again, each shuffling sequence would be stopped at a random time by a human. I would defy even the best programmer with the world's greatest supercomputer to predict an outcome.
     
  9. VegasGalPoker

    VegasGalPoker Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    Not to throw a monkey wrench into this, but about those sequential royal machines. These machines pay a premium for a sequential royal. I believe I read somewhere that for those machines they altered the number of times a sequential will appear so that the extra payoff will not have to be paid out every day or so. I think I read about this in either Strictly Slots or Casino Player, but it was a while ago. Do you, Frank or you, Dan know anything aobut this...or did I dream this? You two probably wouldn't be surprised by the numbert of VP dreams I have had.
     
  10. Dan Paymar

    Dan Paymar Active Member Founding Member

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    Every day or so???? Hardly. Besides being strictly illegal in Nevada, there would be no reason for the casino to artificially reduce the number of sequential royals. There are 120 permutations of five items; that is, the five royal cards can be put in 120 different orders, so only one in 60 royals, or one in over 2.4 million hands, will be in sequence one way or the other. For most players, that's one in about 3,000 hours of play, or a year and a half if you play as a full time job.

    Back before Stations casinos bought Texas casino and made it Texas Station, that casino had a bank of FPDW with $12,500 reversible royal. I played those machines a lot, and in spite of those enormous odds against it, I hit a reversible royal twice on that bank of machines. This only reinforces the claim that the games are truly random because "ransom" does NOT mean expected distribution.
     
  11. VegasGalPoker

    VegasGalPoker Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    Thanks, Dan for clearing that up. Awesome on the 2 reversibles, too! In terms of reversible strategy, would you hold cards in reversible position simply for the potential payoff? I don't do that. As the saying goes, "You can't hit it if you don't play for it." I suspect that barring 3 or 4 to the royal in order or not, I won't throw away a paying hand for a possible reversible unless those 3 or 4 were connected and all high? Is this correct? FWIW, I'm not much of a wild card VP player. But I will play it for quarters of the prog is high or if the 2222A is high on deuces bonus.
     
  12. Dan Paymar

    Dan Paymar Active Member Founding Member

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    When those FPDW were available with Reversible Royal I found two cases where three royal cards in position for a possible sequential moved up in the strategy chart.
    There are probably some such situations in currently available games, but none that I know of that offer over 100% return.
    In 8/5 JoB with Reversible Royal, the royal draw might move above a 10-J-Q-K-9 straight flush, but I haven't tested that.
     
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  13. VegasGalPoker

    VegasGalPoker Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    Thank you for the tips! :)

     
  14. Frank Kneeland

    Frank Kneeland Active Member Lineage to Founders

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    I'm doing house renovations and not online much for the next few weeks. I agree with everything Dan said.
     


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