It brings you to a members only section where you have to subscribe to get
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In a message dated 3/13/2005 12:58:47 AM Eastern Standard Time,
compuflyers@prodigy.net writes:
For those so interested (hopefully this link works!)
http://www.gamingtoday.com/scasino_games.cfm?articleid=12466
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
let's try it this way....I've posted the article into this e-mail.
-----------
With the advent of games like Double Double Bonus poker, some
pressure has been taken off of the royal flush as the sole hand to
be considered a jackpot. Quad aces with a 2, 3 or 4 kicker can pay
as much as half a royal while occurring far more frequently.
This leaves the royal flush as the critical hand for most versions
of video poker. Ignoring progressives for a second, royals account
for about 2 percent of the payback of most games. Given this, even a
full-pay jacks or better machine paying 99.5 percent is reduced to
97.5 percent while you're not hitting that royal. This can make for
a tough session without one. In the long run, to win at a game like
jacks or better, you have to get your share of royals. What does
this really mean?
While using expert strategy when playing a full-pay jacks or better
machine, a royal flush should show up about once in 40,400 hands.
Playing at 600 hands per hour, this means you should hit a royal
every 67-68 hours of play. So, if you go to Las Vegas two weeks a
year and play five hours a day, you're about guaranteed to get a
royal, right? If only it were that simple.
If an event is supposed to occur once every 68 hours, how likely is
it to occur only 10 hours apart, or perhaps as spread out as 200
hours? Or should we expect most occurrences to be very close to 68
hours apart?
I suppose I could try and demonstrate the answer through anecdotal
evidence. When I was younger, I used to go out to Las Vegas for
several weeks a year and play video poker for two to three hours per
night. It took five or six years of playing before I hit my first
royal flush.
A month later, I hit my second. Later that week, I hit a third.
Aside from hitting one on a 100-play machine (which I don't really
consider hitting a royal), that was the last one I hit, roughly
seven years ago.
Admittedly, I don't go out to Las Vegas as often since my dad passed
away, but there has been far more than 68 hours logged in those
seven years! On one of my earliest trips to Las Vegas, a woman
behind me hit a royal for a nickel and said it was the first time
she had ever played video poker and had only been playing for an
hour!
Anecdotal evidence tends to be amusing, but hardly reliable.
Instead, I prefer to rely on mathematical models and computer
programs to analyze these types of situations. In this case, I
decided on the latter. I set up a program to simulate an event that
would occur once every 40,400 hands our royal. I then played out 1
billion hands and kept track of the interval between royal flushes.
I found the results to be fascinating.
Over the 1 billion hands, we drew 24,752 royals, or one every
40,400.78 hands. About 1.1 percent of these occurred in the 67- or
68-hour mark after the previous royal. About 7 percent of the royals
occurred between the 62- and 73-hour mark, or within five hours of
the average.
In fact, it was more common that a royal occurred within the first
five hours since the previous royal than in this 11 hour span around
average. Nearly a quarter of royals will occur after more than 150
hours, or more than twice average, while about two-thirds of our
royals will occur in less than the average span.
So what do we learn from all this? First of all, the word average
can be rather misleading. It does tell us that, because it accounts
for 2 percent of the payback, we need to see one every 40,400 hands
in order to have a good chance of achieving our expected payback of
99.5 percent.
It does not mean that we should expect to see one every 40,400 hands
or so. While my own personal experiences probably highlighted some
less than common examples, it's pretty clear to me that I have been
dealing with nothing out of the ordinary. It is not that uncommon to
hit two royals within a few hours or to go a hundred hours or more
without hitting one. I know, because I've lived them both. Twice!
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, joel0457@a... wrote:
It brings you to a members only section where you have to
subscribe to get
access.
In a message dated 3/13/2005 12:58:47 AM Eastern Standard Time,
compuflyers@p... writes:
For those so interested (hopefully this link works!)http://www.gamingtoday.com/scasino_games.cfm?articleid=12466
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]