How bad is this Airport Deuces penalty.

[olds442jetaway]

     I hate to even ask and bother someone with this question. If I could compute it myself, I would do it. I haven't kept up with the one course I did have 50 years ago in statistics, so here goes.....Playing Airport Deuces for 4,000 hands at bet 5 quarters, how bad is the penalty for never going for inside straights (you have no deuce) and never drawing with 2 two high cards to a Royal. ( In other words just toss the 2 high cards and hope for something good on the draw.) I know with perfect strategy, the long term return is 98.91. My gut feeling is the return is still well over 98.0, but I could be wrong. I ask this because many Deuces Wild players I know including myself, go against perfect strategy by playing the above way most of the time. I know Bob is cringing as I speak. If someone has the time to compute the answer, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

[oldgodslive]

sorry, but what the heck is airport deuces?

[Galeygoo]

I thought I was the only one who didn't know.  Thanks for asking, ogl

[FloridaPhil]

I posed this same strategy question about 6-8 months ago.  Airport Deuces has a bunch of names.  The pay schedule is 25/15/9/4/4/3/2/1 which is a 98.91% game with max coins.  It's a fairly common game and except for NSU deuces is my game of choice.   I have never played full pay deuces, so I can't comment on that.  Because of the deuces you do hit inside straights often in this game, so I would stick with the computer strategy to double my money.  I don't know the exact numbers, but I've tried not going for inside straights myself and I felt it hurt me more than it helped.  There are members on this forum who can calculate the penalty exactly.We stick mostly to the computer strategy except for a few small changes.   The computer says to throw away A-10s, A-K, A-J & A-Q without a deuce.  We always hold them and we do hit more wild royals than normal.  My wife has hit two real royal flushes holding them and I have hit one, putting us both ahead on this hand for years.   Any variance from computer strategy will hurt you in time.  We are both more interested in hitting royals than making a few cents here and there, so the choice is easy.  At the level Bob Dancer plays, even a small mistake can have real consequences.  Airport Deuces is normally a negative game that he would never play anyway.