This week, we’re featuring two questions from people commenting on a recent video where Raymond pushed the button to draw cards leading to a massive win for Brian Christopher on video poker. Today we’ll feature part one, and tomorrow we’ll feature part two.
I thought with video poker the “deck of cards” is shuffled at the beginning of the hand by the RNG and then dealt out, so timing isn’t actually a factor during the second deal? Or is that not true?
Henry H.
Video Poker is different than a slot given the use of a deck of cards, replicated to match the randomness of a fully shuffled deck of physical cards.
An employee of Action Poker, which develops many of the Video Poker variations seen in casinos, previously interviewed online shared two ways that a video poker game could operate:
- It could select all 10 potential cards used when you hit deal – the first five are dealt out, and, based on which cards you discard, it fills in the gaps starting with the 6th
- It deals out five cards, and the remaining 47 continue to be shuffled up until the time you hit draw.
The latter is how most video poker machines over the last couple of decades have worked (given one distributor having a pretty strong market share), but either approach is equally random and valid in the eyes of gaming regulations.
So, given that knowledge, timing is actually a factor for the second deal, because the cards that are dealt on the draw aren’t determined until the moment you press the button.
This is not unlike the Wheel of Fortune wheel, where you press spin, land the wheel bonus, and press spin again to determine the wheel’s actual outcome.
This doesn’t change the odds of a particular outcome happening, and for the purposes of the player they work basically the same, as we don’t really know what cards will land if we pressed the button at a different time. But technically speaking, the timing does matter!
Have a question? Submit yours here!
In the first method, if 10 cards are already drawn when you hit Deal, isn’t that considered a predetermined outcome?Regardless of what Hold buttons are pressed, each possible replacement card is already determined…
#FlipTheSwitch #BCLuck #MarcoLuck
Great question Joseph… and the answer is no, it’s not quite predetermined. Here’s an example: Let’s say that you are dealt a pair of Jacks and three other random cards. The general play would be to keep the jacks. But let’s say a player doesn’t discard all three other cards for some reason. Now let’s presume the next cards would be something like A, 3, J… if they don’t throw away three cards, they won’t get the third jack to improve to three of a kind. So it’s not fully predetermined in that the player still has some involvement in the action because they decide which cards to keep and discard. Hopefully that makes sense!