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Every time I writer about video poker --- and that’s often, in a long-time offline favorite that’s such a natural for online gaming --- I get a flurry of e-mail with questions from readers. Let's try to answer a few, starting with one of the most common questions asked about video poker:
Q. You wrote that the video poker program sets all 10 cards that you could see in a hand before it deals the cards. Are those cards then dealt in order, or does your draw depend on which cards you discard?
A. This is a topic that bears revisiting from time to time, because the answer changes. Current video poker programs no longer set 10 cards at once. Instead, they set the five cards you see on the screen, then continuously reshuffle the remaining cards until you hit the draw button.
When you draw, you get the top card or cards off the reshuffled deck, regardless of which cards you draw, or their positions on the screen.
That’s at least version three of how video poker cards are dealt. Until the early 2000s, 10 cards were set --- the five on the initial deal, plus a stack of five potential replacement cards. Replacements were dealt from the top of the stack --- again, screen position didn’t matter.
The earliest video poker games in the 1980s dealt "shadow hands" behind the initial five cards, as if each position on the screen was actually a two-card stack. With a shadow hand, if you discarded the first card on the left, your draw would be the card directly underneath, and if you discarded the second card from the left, you'd get the card under that one, so that each draw would be unique. Programming has moved on since then.
Q. I've had numerous occurances that when I've drawn one card to a straight, or full house, I've had the same identical card returned to me on the draw that I had just discarded. Can you explain this?
A. By "same identical card," I'm assuming the draw is the same denomination of card in a different suit--for example, a 5 of clubs being replaced by a 5 of hearts.
If it's the same suit and denomination, there's something wrong with the program and the game should be taken out of service until the computer chip is changed.
There are streaks when it seems every time we're making a one-card draw for a straight or full house, we get the same denomination card and fail to improve the hand.
The operative word is "seems." I've found that there's a little selective memory at work, and a few instances of what seems to be an odd occurrence will cause us to take note every time it happens, while the times it doesn't happen don't stick in our memories.
By random chance, when we make a one-card draw we should receive a card of the same denomination 3 times per 47 trials, or a little more often than 1 in 16 hands. It's well within random chance that such a thing could happen several times in a row, leading us to think it the machine is programmed for that to happen. But if you really keep track of what happens over a long period or in several sessions, keeping track of every one-card draw, the effect disappears.
Q. Why don't you tell your readers that the payback percentages with expert play would be attainable only if machines were programmed so that every card had an equal chance of appearing, but that's not the way they're programmed? For example, if they were programmed that way, expert play would bring a straight flush once per 9,000 hands, but the machines are programmed so that expert play will bring a straight flush only once per 10,000 hands. The payback percentage with expert play on Jacks or Better isn't really 99.5 percent, it's something less.
A. I won't tell my readers that, because it's not true. Over the years I’ve been in touch with video poker designers, programmers, regulators and casino operators who all assure me every card has an equal chance of being dealt. The odds on video poker are the same as if the cards were a physical deck, randomly shuffled and dealt by a human dealer.
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