Video Poker Forum

Ok. Today someone got 3 royals in 5 games in the monthly contest. Last month someone got 10 sets of deuces in the monthly. These results are wayyyyyyyyyyy out of the norm. Anyone care to comment?

3 royals over a span of 500 hands. Absolutely incredible. Almost unbelievable. Inspirational.

Pretty sure this is the first time we've ever seen that. So we probably won't see it again for another 6 or 7 years.

Hats off to clubhouse77.

Out of the norm? Absolutely. The norm has never been known to win a contest.

Well, you should take into consideration that the player in question played SIX games today. Thus, scoring at least 3 royals in one day was about 73% more likely than if he had played only FIVE. So, anyone wishing to duplicate the feat will have a better chance if they save up a session or two from the previous days before trying this at home.

Waaay waaay back, when I had just started playing the monthly contest, I hit two royals in one day, and thought that was pretty good! My total score for the day was, I believe, a little more than 10,000, and I was the contest leader for about two weeks, before fading to a sixth or seventh place finish.

Congrats, omt. It is very tough to get into contention. And then it is even more difficult to stay in contention.

Anything can happen when you are dealing with randomness. Once saw a lady hit a progressive Royal. Staff paid her and she promptly hit the Royal again. I once hit 3WAK on back to back hands playing DDB.

New2vp wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 08, 2020 8:57 pm

Congrats, omt. It is very tough to get into contention. And then it is even more difficult to stay in contention.

You bet! My thought is that you need three royals, or the equivalent in other premium hands, to even contend, and a fourth to have a reasonable expectation of winning. Needless to say - it's tough.

For good measure, the same person got yet another royal today, after holding ONE card. This is the kind of stuff that tells me that most of us have zero chance of ever winning a contest on this site. If I get one royal, or even AAAA kicker, it seems like a miracle.

New2vp wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 08, 2020 5:00 pm

Well, you should take into consideration that the player in question played SIX games today. Thus, scoring at least 3 royals in one day was about 73% more likely than if he had played only FIVE. So, anyone wishing to duplicate the feat will have a better chance if they save up a session or two from the previous days before trying this at home.

True, except that the royals were hit over a 4 game span, between deal #71 of one game and deal #67 of the fourth game, so 3 royals were hit in about 400 hands if my math is right.

Actually, if all we knew was that the third royal was hit 3 sessions later than the session including the first royal, we could estimate that there were 3 royals hit in about 301 hands. 400 would be the max (1st hand in session 1 and last in session 4), but they could have been hit in as few as 202 hands (last hand in session 1 and first hand in session 4)! In this case, we know that the 3 royals spanned 297 hands, quite close to the expectation of 301. Nevertheless, of course my calculation was tongue-in-cheek and designed to duplicate 3 royals in a day, not to hit them in the precise order or the number of hands in which the lucky contest leader did. Certainly, the calcs can be done to take into consideration lots of different things. For example, I did not factor in that in order to get that record, you might want to go for royals more often than you would if you employed standard max-EV strategy.

If you want to make the odds a degree of magnitude larger, we can even throw in the idea that, with the 4th royal, he had the somewhat unusual event of hitting a royal in all 4 suits. On any random string of royals, you will cover all four suits with four consecutive royals only about 9.4% of the time. Obviously, he is also going against the odds when one of his royals was dealt and one was hit while drawing 4 cards. Can a complete redraw royal be far behind?