What are the chances?

[Lucky Larry]

Phil,
While we usually will play a lower denomination to maintain 5 coin play when my timing is off we too will play multi-hand 1 coin. Only a RF (1:40K chance) or AWAK TDB doesn't give you a 20% payback. The multi-hand also spreads out the risks and often leads to an increase in bank roll which allows us to move back to 5 coin. We've also gotten several hand pays playing 25-50 hand 1 coin TDB 5¢.

[FloridaPhil]

There is a small casino is Miami that has a very interesting pay schedule.  There is no penalty for playing one coin.  The 4000 coin bonus scales up and down with the number of coins.  I play there whenever I can.  I also play one coin when I'm not having a good day.  Frequently, I hit a good hand and am back in the running.

[COLTON]

A couple of years ago on a two-day trip to Barona in California, on the same day (within about three hours of each) I was twice "dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker"---on a 10 Play $1 game and on a $10 Single Line Video Poker game. Unfortunately, both times I was playing Deuces Wild. What made it particularly painful is that 80% of my play that day had been on either Double Double Bonus, Super Double Bonus or Triple Double Bonus. To this day, I have never been dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker on any of those games.

[BillyJoe]

A couple of years ago on a two-day trip to Barona in California, on the same day (within about three hours of each) I was twice "dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker"---on a 10 Play $1 game and on a $10 Single Line Video Poker game. Unfortunately, both times I was playing Deuces Wild. What made it particularly painful is that 80% of my play that day had been on either Double Double Bonus, Super Double Bonus or Triple Double Bonus. To this day, I have never been dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker on any of those games.
OUCH..  $40k in TDB out the window each time. That is why I am afraid to play DW.

[Tedlark]

[QUOTE=COLTON]A couple of years ago on a two-day trip to Barona in California, on the same day (within about three hours of each) I was twice "dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker"---on a 10 Play $1 game and on a $10 Single Line Video Poker game. Unfortunately, both times I was playing Deuces Wild. What made it particularly painful is that 80% of my play that day had been on either Double Double Bonus, Super Double Bonus or Triple Double Bonus. To this day, I have never been dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker on any of those games.
OUCH..  $40k in TDB out the window each time. That is why I am afraid to play DW. [/QUOTE]

  There is no guarantee that you would have been dealt the aces when you were playing DDB, SDB, or TDB.

[FloridaPhil]

On our last trip to Black Hawk, I hit two $200 Royals in one day.   Not fun, but it's more than I would have won playing on this website. 

[COLTON]

[QUOTE=billyjoe][QUOTE=COLTON]A couple of years ago on a two-day trip to Barona in California, on the same day (within about three hours of each) I was twice "dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker"---on a 10 Play $1 game and on a $10 Single Line Video Poker game. Unfortunately, both times I was playing Deuces Wild. What made it particularly painful is that 80% of my play that day had been on either Double Double Bonus, Super Double Bonus or Triple Double Bonus. To this day, I have never been dealt 4 Aces with a Kicker on any of those games.
OUCH..  $40k in TDB out the window each time. That is why I am afraid to play DW. [/QUOTE]

  There is no guarantee that you would have been dealt the aces when you were playing DDB, SDB, or TDB.[/QUOTE]

Yes, you are absolutely correct. I keep telling myself that, but in the universe of hands dealt to me, it seems that they come within the normal range of expected distribution. I've charted dealt 4 of a kinds over the same period of time, and while the number of dealt 4 Aces seems consistent with other 4OAK's, unfortunately two of them were on a game (Deuces Wild) where you receive little benefit---in other words, they haven't been showing up in the games where you get the terrific payout.

[New2vp]

It is really difficult to judge such low probability events by your own experience.  And when I say "judge," I mean distinguishing between machines that are rigged vs. those that are perfectly fairly random.The average "cycle time" to get dealt quad aces on any 52-card game is 54,145 deals.But let's say we have 20 people playing 3 times that many hands (162,435 deals) at different casinos on fair games, but they do not know for certain whether they are fair or not.  The expected number of dealt quad aces in this experiment would be 3 sets per player.But it's very likely that the unluckiest player of the 20 will get no instances of dealt quads.  And it's quite likely that a couple of the 20 will get 6 sets or even more during the same time frame.Now consider that instead of 20 different players, we divide your own video poker experience into 20 different sessions, perhaps based on the different games you play.   Again, it is not unusual that you would have wildly different experiences on different games.  And of course, it would be exasperating to get more dealt quad aces on Deuces Wild than on Triple Double Bonus.  But please note, this would mean checking the results of 3.25 million deals (20 x 162,435).  Even for full-time every-week players, this would perhaps be 3 years or more worth of play.I'm not saying this proves that some games aren't rigged.  I'm just saying that even an expert statistician would not be able to determine whether a game was rigged to reduce the number of dealt quad aces with a sample size that is as "small" as 162,000 dealt hands, even though that will take you quite a lot of time to play that many.Following are what we can expect if we have 20 different players or 20 different measurement periods of 162,435 hands each (with rounded results): 




No. of Quad Aces Dealt
Probability
Expected Players with that number


0
0.0498
1.0


1
0.1494
3.0


2
0.2240
4.5


3
0.2240
4.5


4
0.1680
3.4


5
0.1008
2.0


6
0.0504
1.0


7+
0.0335
0.7