What do you think

[EDC1977]

  I thought little green men was a video slot?   

[MikeA]

10-seconds is WAY too long to wait.  More like a millishake.Seriously, have you any idea how many instructions a microprocessor can execute in just 1 second?  Millions!!!!   And each position on a held hand has the value for that position recomputed constantly by those processors (RNG) until the position is excluded from the routine by the player pressing the "HOLD" button for that position.Even if you could watch the calculated value of the card to be displayed in the non-held positions, you could not possibly press the HOLD button on exactly the correct millisecond or nanosecond to latch onto it before it was recalculated.At least, I am told IGT machines function that way.  Possibly there are others that precompute the card to be drawn and place it "behind" the hard that is displayed after the DEAL.   This describes a method that has been discarded (pun intended) in favor of the "constant RNG" method.  But there may still be some machines in use from days-of-old that still function this way.  But if they did, waiting would do no good since the card you would draw in any given position in the held hand would have been pre-selected at the time of the Deal.As for patterns....I can't help but notice "patterns" while playing VP.  I mean what else is there to do while punching buttons and concentrating on the images being displayed.  I imagine it takes all of about 5% of your brain to engage in making hold decisions based on strategy.  That leaves, in my case, about 2% of my total brain power free to notice patterns!  I can't help but notice them.  Not that I can place any significance on those patterns.  Well, I guess I can place some significance on them.  It was the byproduct of "patterns" I think that must have resulted in the introduction of Quick Quads.This past weekend, I played DDB quite a bit.  The last round was at AmeriStar where I got bored enough to play 6/5 DDB.  I dropped $5 for 100 credits into the machine and played it down to 10 or so credits before hitting 400-credit quad-3's.  Now with a bit oveer 400 credits ($20) in the machine I figured I hadn't killed enough time to entertain me while I was waiting on my wife fore Breakfast at the Falcon Diner (a place that has good food, but also is slower in serving the molasses on a winter morning!).  I decided to play through that 400 and see what happened.  Just as you stated Duckhunter, I was down to $.75 on the machine (15 credits) when I hit quads again for 400 and again, it was Quad 3's.  This put me back up to $20 again and using my infallible logic, figured that the machine had decided that it was going to pay me $15 to quit that session so I took it and ran.  Actually, I should have bailed when I hit the first 400-credit quad since the machine was so Negative.  I usually RUN anytime I get significantly ahead on a really Negative machine.Let's look at this scenario a bit.  I figure I got really lucky on that initial quad hit on $5 because I hit it after playing probably 30 or 40 hands.  The machine was giving quite a few "pushes" but Trips and higher were rare!  Else I would have had a higher credit balance!  So hitting the quad was very lucky.  With 400 credits on the counter, I played it down to 15 credits before hitting my next quad.  I figure that I must have played 500+ hands between quads.Probabilities suggest that you will average one quad every 430 hands or in that neighborhood.  That happened to be pretty close to what I'd played and the result was that it came when I had only 15 credits left on the counter.  Is that coincidence?  Or is it just playing out the scenario projected by probabilities?  It does happen quite frequently to me exactly as this weekend's experience revealed but I think that it is just underscoring that you should trust the math.With the Player's Cards, I don't think they are tied into the processor that is used to generate Random Numbers nor do I think that it is in any way used to create interruption logic by controlling the hands that are dealt on the machine you happen to have the Card plugged into.  That is opinion of course.  I have no first hand knowledge any more than anyone else not working for IGT or other game manufacturers or Casino Management.But that brings up a really sore point for me personally having to do with Player's Club Cards and VP players.  Casinos that bottom out the paytables with 6/5 DDB and other such insults to knowledgeable VP players and then slash comps to 1/2 of that awarded to slot players is bordering on criminal to my way of thinking.  We're getting screwed TWICE!  And the sad thing is that even if the machines were "tabled" to produce 100% or even 99% expected return, the majority of people playing those machines would very likely not play them close enough to perfect to give the casino less than 94% or 95% return!  VP negative expectation paytables HAS to be a matter of greed and Principle to the Casinos.  They just do not want to give any possibility of a player getting an even break with them.  I don't know if I'd be any different were I a Casino Boss though since they can and do get away with it.

[shadowman]

I think I mentioned this several months ago, but I wrote a program to count the number of RNG cycles on my old 1 ghz processor. I just ran it again on my new 1.6 gHz processor and came up with over 2 million generated numbers/second. If we assume the processors in a VP machine are quite a bit slower and doing other tasks, say 1/4 the speed, it would still come out to 500,000 numbers/second. 
 
So, waiting 10 seconds would allow 5 million potential cards to pass by. Maybe a little overkill.  In fact, in just a tenth of a second, there are still 50,000 cards sliding by. In other words, it is a complete waste of our time to try and time any draws.
 

[burnsy]

Shadowman, my wife and I went to Lake Charles,LA. last month to L'Auberge du Lac casino. I was playing DDB 9/6, when I  was dealt a heart  flush 9 10 J Q A. My first thought was to hold for a royal. But I was low on credits ( 10) and already put several dollars into the machine, so I opted for the flush. The next hand dealt the King of hearts came up where the 9 of hearts was. My question is, would that King had been there if I  had threw the 9 away? Yes,no or maybe? What was the right move?       

[Eduardo]

I'd say there was a 1/47 chance of it.

[oej719]

That is a head scratcher. That has happened to me except I went for the royal and got a pair out of the hand.

[MikeA]

Shadowman, my wife and I went to Lake Charles,LA. last month to L'Auberge du Lac casino. I was playing DDB 9/6, when I  was dealt a heart  flush 9 10 J Q A. My first thought was to hold for a royal. But I was low on credits ( 10) and already put several dollars into the machine, so I opted for the flush. The next hand dealt the King of hearts came up where the 9 of hearts was. My question is, would that King had been there if I  had threw the 9 away? Yes,no or maybe? What was the right move?       I know your were addressing this to SM and if he doesn't agree, I'm sure he'll correct me, and rightfully so.You had a 1 in 47 chance of discarding that 9 and drawing the correct King of Hearts.On the hand following the one you were dealt when the King of Hearts came up in that hand, there was from a 1:47 chance to a 1:52 chance depending on which sequence out of 5 that the King of Hearts was selected.You could compound that by a significant increase in odds if you require that the King of Hearts be delt into a specific position in the hand though that really isn't a factor.The point is that in the hand following the one in which you were dealt a 4-card Royal, the fact that the card you were looking for in the previous hand showed up, was just random chance and does not mean that you made the right or wrong decision in the previous hand.  The correct play though in EVERY circumstance I can think of is to throw away the odd card in any dealt hand if you have a 4-card Royal Dealt to you.At least, that's my opinion.

[EDC1977]

 Depending on the credit situation, the gambler says to go for it however the er has to be minimal between the two hands. 4 card royal or dealt flush? I would be more apt to hold the flush to get the 6 for 1 and try again. Its up to lady luck and mr. RNG to make your day or put a turd in your easter basket! I stand corrected. The correct play is to hold for the royal. 4 card rf at 91.80085  flush hold at 30.00000

[MikeA]

 Depending on the credit situation, the gambler says to go for it however the er has to be minimal between the two hands. 4 card royal or dealt flush? I would be more apt to hold the flush to get the 6 for 1 and try again. Its up to lady luck and mr. RNG to make your day or put a turd in your easter basket! I stand corrected. The correct play is to hold for the royal. 4 card rf at 91.80085  flush hold at 30.00000Quite a difference in EV isn't it?  Most of the times, you will miss it.  But that 1:47 that you hit it more than makes up for the misses.  30x47=1,410 that you would lose assuming that you would never replace the tossed card with another of the same suit nor catch the 4000 for the Royal.But once every 47 (by averages) would return you 4000.  Almost a 3 to 1 better set of odds in going for the Royal in this case (2.83 to 1 to be exact).

[shadowman]

As already indicated it is almost always best to go for the 4RF. You could still end up with a flush or straight and have lost very little. The odds are against you hitting the RF, but it will show up and you never know when that will happen.
 
As for your specific question, I think MikeA answered it already, the RNG kept running while you were debating what to do, so nothing was predetermined.
 
There was a time (over 8 years ago) when the next 5 cards were preselected at the same time the initial 5 cards were dealt. This is no longer true and it still wouldn't have affected your situation since the RNG would have started before you pressed deal for the next hand.