What Would It Take???

[OTABILL]

Frank:  Happy Birthday  Btw, while I didn't keep tarck of  how many hands I was dealt, over a four hour span 2 nights ago, I got no repeat no 4 of a kinds or full houses on the draw when dealt three of a kind. The only 4 of a kind I got was when I threw all my cards away and got queens on the draw. Played a DDB progressive. Thank goodness my wife did better so our losses were minimized.

[Frank Kneeland]

Frank:  Happy Birthday  Btw, while I didn't keep tarck of  how many hands I was dealt, over a four hour span 2 nights ago, I got no repeat no 4 of a kinds or full houses on the draw when dealt three of a kind. The only 4 of a kind I got was when I threw all my cards away and got queens on the draw. Played a DDB progressive. Thank goodness my wife did better so our losses were minimized. I've had even weirder days where it seems like the more cards I hold to a draw the less likely it is that I get it. Once I remember hitting 3 sets of Deuces in 8 hours, dealt, redrawn and holding one, but none holding two or more. Yep...randomness is not merely stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.~FK

[Frank Kneeland]

I met with my programmer friend this week and we got about 75% of the work on the utility completed. A couple more weeks and it should be done.~FK

[moneyla]

Is it soup yet? For those of you who already know the answer... I believe the cards are random. Will I discover the games are rigged or not random? 

[Eduardo]

I just came in here for the soup. But I look forward to other results too.

[faygo]

I just came in here for the soup. But I look forward to other results too.

 
I'll have the Gazpachos, please, while we wait.

[Frank Kneeland]

Last month my BJI article was about how I put to rest my own concerns about the fairness of VP machines. It was entitled The Death of Doubt. You can read it here: http://www.bjinsider.com/newsletter_147_doubt.shtmlI make it very clear in the article that I don't expect anyone to be doing things the way I did and that I would go over how to do it yourself in the May issue. That article has been postponed, since I'm still working on the utility. Taking its place this month is an article entitled, "The Very Special (Not)Theory of Relativity, which is about how loss limits, win goals, and other "rules" affect time and perception without changing the reality.My June article will include the Utility that I've been working on and easy instructions for use. I will also post it on my web-site for free.Thanks for all the help.~FK

[Frank Kneeland]

A search for something betterThere's several reasons why I've decided I don't like The Chi Squared Test for VP analysis.1. It treats things with extremely divergent frequencies more or less the same. Intuition tells me that flipping a coin twenty times and expecting it to come up heads 10 times is fundamentally different from playing 350,000 hands of video poker and expecting 10 Royals. The Chi test only looks at expected vs. actual and seems to be somewhat frequency irrespective. Expecting 10 heads on twenty flips of a 50/50 coin toss, simply isn't the same as expecting 10 Royals on a 1 in 35,000 probability. To Chi they are the same.2. If casinos were going to go to the trouble of gaffing machines, we can say with almost absolute certainty that they would NOT gaff them in the players favor. The Chi test treats getting too many of something exactly the same as getting too few. This isn't realistic. Getting too many of something should reduce our skepticism and getting too few would increase it.3. If you track enough things, like flushes, full houses, etc...You would expect to run good on some and bad on others. And indeed the more things you tracked the more askew you'd expect your distribution to look. The Chi Test is blind to this kind of normal variance. If one did run extremely good on flushes and extremely bad on Full Houses the Chi Test would render a larger chance of the machines being non-random when in fact I'd say that type of fluctuation is exactly what one should expect.4. Getting exactly the number of things you'd expect to get is just as unlikely as getting too few or too many in a truly random distribution. The Chi test doesn't account for this at all. On class II machines that are clearly non-random and spit out hands based on a pre-determined pay rate, the chi test would find the abnormal consistancy to be proof of randomness when in fact it would be proof against.I'm convinced that the Chi Test is far less than perfect for this task, what remains is for someone to recommend something better.The biggest part of the utility is the data tracking and entry. There's still plenty of time to add more and better tests. I hope we find something.~FK

[faygo]

Frank
 
I'm a simple man. Did you just say  " there isn't anyway to prove or disprove random"?
Does random in of itself defy  such testing?

[Frank Kneeland]

Frank
 
I'm a simple man. Did you just say  " there isn't anyway to prove or disprove random"?
Does random in of itself defy  such testing?No that's not the gist of what I was saying. What I was attempting to convey is that I seriously doubt that the Chi Squared Test is the BEST test to use for video poker related testing. One could do far better if they designed a VP specific test. I'm afraid that sort of project is the kind of thing mathematicians devote a lifetime to, and I don't have a lifetime to spare.I was hoping someone knew of a preexisting test that would be better suited to VP than Chi.I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying the Chi Test does not appear to be the best way to do it, even though it's industry standard.~FK