Don't you hate it....RNG/VP

[JH1]

Try this for a good explanation of the RNG and VP in old and new machines:
http://robison.casinocitytimes.com/articles/5884.html

Jean H--

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.... Dr. Seuss

···

----- Original Message ----
From: Scott Norwood <magnum0829@yahoo.com>
To: vpFREE@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 11:04:06 AM
Subject: Re: [vpFREE] Re:Don't you hate it..........

I'm thinking I read somewhere many years ago that video poker deals 5 cards + 5 cards, total of 10 at once, meaning a card is behind the card you discard. So you would never know what might have been. I could be mistaken. Any one else heard of this?

Magnum.

Don Del Grande <del_grande@earthlink.net> wrote:
Lee Crowell wrote:

when you do the right thing and it turns out wrong?

Last Thursday I checked into Harrah's LV- hey, I know, but friends
were in town- on my second hand on the progressive $1 bank in Poker
place, I was dealt AKQ of diamonds and the Q of clubs- the
progressive was at $4,250- so of course, I hold the 2 Qs, but as
I'm reaching for the deal button, I'm thinking, hey, it's only my
second hand, maybe I should go for the royal? But, as usual, I went
back to my favorite line- play right or don't play at all. You can
guess what 2 cards came up. Did I mention how much I hate that?

Of course, that makes the assumptions that:
(a) the deck is "shuffled" when you press the play button, and nothing
changes the order of the cards in that game from that point (otherwise,
had you not hesitated, you probably wouldn't have been dealt the JT), and
(b) when you discard, the replacement cards are dealt "from the top of
the deck" (insert "I know casinos where they must have been dealing from
the bottom" jokes here), as opposed to "dealing" 10 cards at the start,
with each card having its potential replacement determined at that point.

Has it ever been established how VP machines "work" in terms of how the
cards are dealt during a game?

-- Don

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[Harry_Porter]

K/J Haka wrote:

Try this for a good explanation of the RNG and VP in old and new
machines:
http://robison.casinocitytimes.com/articles/5884.html

You know, while I have absolutely no knowledge of the underlying
facts, I still have difficulty accepting that the reason for the shift
from 10-card dealing to 5-card deal/5-card draw was that some team
devised a method by which to determine what cards were available on
the draw under the 10-card method. (Of course, I'm limiting my
skepticism to machines manufactured by mainstream cos such as IGT, who
was the respondent in the original post.)

If I understand correctly, the RNG spits out a number that ranges into
the millions in possibilities. Each possibility is mapped to a card
of the deck, with the consequence that 10's of thousands of numbers
are mapped to each card.

Thus, when you look at a particular 5 card deal, it's virtually
impossible to determine the underlying RNG values that generated those
cards. Yet, in order to predict what the additional 5 cards of the
deal are, such a determination is necessary.

I further understood that between hands the RNG kept running under the
10-card method, spitting out the next number only after the Bet or
Deal button was pressed. This means that outside of the current deal,
there was no related information available from prior deals that would
betray something of value about the current hand RNG sequence.

I look on tales of "teams" breaking the vp RNG as apocryphal (i.e.
"urban legend"). I may be off-track. Of course, there have been
credible tales of a casino with old off-brand equipment that didn't
cycle between deals nor between deal and draw, thus generating the
identical stream of cards over a long cycle -- then adding (in this
case) injury to insult, the casino restarted the machines at the
beginning of each gaming day. Play such a machine once (optimally
tossing every dealt hand) and you can observe the optimal draws to
play at the beginning of each ensuing day.

To date, I haven't really heard a satisfactory explanation as to what
prompted IGT to switch their dealing. I surmise it was simply a
matter of, "hey, we can introduce one more joker into the
pseuo-randomness mix at negligible cost -- why not do it?" For that
matter, maybe it was inspired by a IGT programmer who avidly plays vp
and got tired of saying to him/herself, "Damn! Held the wrong card
again!"

- Harry