GRAYTLEEGRAY@aol.com wrote:
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Let's ask Skip what he was comparing them to...paytable wise.
I was comparing them to UGLY DUCKS. <g>
Just when and where did the acronym first get used?
Hey GRAY, I have been asked about it so many times over the years, I wrote a Skip's Tips article about it in SS (about 5 years ago). Here's the article (slightly updated and not quite as politically correct):
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/Skip, what does NSU mean? /
Over the last year or so, I have been asked this question... a lot. The term NSU, that is widely applied to a popular 16/10 version of Deuces Wild, is in common usage today and I know I'll keep getting the questions. So in hopes of reducing the load on my mailbox a little, I've decided to tell the whole sordid story.
A few years ago (circa 1996-97), a casino I frequented in Laughlin (Harrah's) changed some of its full pay Deuces Wild to a new pay table that I hadn�t seen anywhere else. Most alternate Deuces paytables seen at that time either shorted the non-deuce quads to 4:1 or (a little sneakier) shorted the 5 of a kind or wild royal (or both). Another common pay table was a 16/13 version that was found all over the Strip but not in the locals or Downtown casinos (I liked to call them �Strip Deuces)�. That game, with a double Jackpot for quad deuces and a 4700-coin royal added, became popularly known as Downtown Deuces or Downtown Double Deuces.
But I digress, the new pay table at Harrah's dropped the traditional 5:1 pay for four of a kind to 4:1. It also increased the pays for a full house from 3:1 to 4:1 and for a flush from 2:1 to 3:1. On first glance it seemed like this had to be a decent tradeoff. After all, you were only lowering one hand by one coin and raising two hands by two coins. It almost seemed too good to be true. I played the game a little bit but was wary of playing too much until I could get home and analyze it.
Well, when I got home and did a little work with VPTUTOR. This was quite a few years ago and my 286 AT clone computer, would run all night to analyze a game. I then realized that the quads actually occurred much more often than the full houses and flushes /combined/! The return on the new game was less than 99%! This was a good lesson for me. I decided to give the variation a moniker on my web site as a warning to unsuspecting players who might be trapped into the same mistake that I had made. I called it Ugly Ducks, using the feathered term for deuces familiar to poker players. A while later another variation showed up with the same pay table but this one raised the five of a kind to 16:1 and the straight flush to 10:1. These changes ran the game up to a more acceptable 99.73%. Having already used up my allotment of "creativity" with the original name, I called this new version Not So Ugly Ducks.
Since the game was not well known, I didn�t give another thought to the corny names until a few years had passed and the 16/10 version suddenly sprouted like dandelions (some look at it as a weed and others as a flower) everywhere you looked. Well, everywhere you looked that had IGT Game Kings, anyway.
The issue came up on the Skip Hughes Group (VPMAIL) about what to call it. In my own defense, I insist I suggested simply "16/10 deuces". Don't get me wrong. I didn�t just suddenly realize that the Ugly Ducks stuff was kinda dumb, but originally it was just my little web site and I had no thoughts or pretensions about setting any standards or coining any names. Anyway by this time, the group numbered about a thousand people who play a heck of a lot of video poker and I could see where it might be going. There was objections that there could be other paytables that could be 16/10. Then, someone suggested using my old term, only shortening it to NSU Deuces. That term caught my attention as I had been playing the game a lot by this time and it was frankly causing me some serious pain, as I had gone about 30,000 hands of dollar "NSU" without quad deuces. Having lived though the sixties and the Vietnam era, I remembered another NSU that inflicted some pain on our GIs (and others) back the sixties. The Blues group Cream even named a song after it. So I got a little giggle out of the idea. So, I supported the NSU moniker, (as did the rest of the group), the name stuck and I have been stuck answering questions about it ever since.
And if Paul Harvey will forgive me, now you know /the rest/ of the story.
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Thanks!
Skip
http://www.vpinsider.com