Research Needed

[faygo]

Must be someone willing to take this on.
 
http://www.freep.com/article/20100617/E ... r-business

[shadowman]

I would suspect these machines are VLTs which do not necessarily produce random results. Too bad the casino wasn't mentioned.

[faygo]

It is very possible that they are VLTS. His column though is mostly based in the Chicago and Detroit markets which are Vegas style machines.  My thinking is that he might have discovered something akin to the flipover.

[cddenver]

Must be someone willing to take this on.

 
I did this with a little sim and 1000 trials:
 







Percent of Total
Runs Of Four To Flush w/o Flush

20%
1

35%
2 or less

48%
3 or less

58%
4 or less

65%
5 or less

70%
6 or less

75%
7 or less

80%
8 or less

84%
9 or less

87%
10 or less

89%
11 or less

92%
12 or less

93%
13 or less

94%
14 or less

95%
15 or less

96%
16 or less

97%
17 or less

98%
18 or less

99%
21 or less

100%
34
 
The article mentions several runs of 24 dealt Four To Flushes without hitting the Flush.  In the test, that happened less than 1% of the time.  That top value of 34 is just over this particular test.  The straight math method will give slightly different results.
 
The article mentions a norm of 14-17.  Only about 3% of runs in my test were longer than 17.
 
In the article it says similar runs like that happen frequently at that casino, often enough that players there actually have a special name for that place.  If the machines were VLT's you'd think there would be all kinds of other runs being noticed that would have been reported, though the particular machine vendor might just have selected dealt Four To Flushes as the "gotcha!" hand.
 
I did some googling to see if I could find any additional info on this, but all that came up were mentions of the article

[pokeherguy]

Been there done that, after playing the same game DDB at the $2 denom in the Tunica, Ms. area without a real complaint I found another casino that caused me to go nuts trying to figure out why they were so different. To this day I have no idea but 4 cards to the flush off the deal was one of my big complaints alonf with a few others like wheres the quad aces, 2's, 3's and 4's. I was told I should see the four to the flush off the deal on average 1 every 36 hands, is this a true statement?

[cddenver]

I was told I should see the four to the flush off the deal on average 1 every 36 hands, is this a true statement?
 
I've got that as 84,688 card combos out of 2,598,960 total combinations, or 1 every 31 hands (not including 4 to RF or 4 to SF).
 
I did some googling of the information in the article to see if there was any followup info (like the name of the casino) and didn't find anything other than some references to the original article.  Has anyone seen anything?
 
 

[pokeherguy]

Thanks for the info cddenver, going with the estimate that I play 800 hands per hour would it be correct then, that on average I should see around 25 "4 to the flush off the draw" per hour?  I had a floor attendant I know pretty well watch while I played and told them to watch how many times I received "4 to the flush off the draw" in around 9 minutes we counted 13 times,  none of which were converted to flushes.

[cddenver]

At 800 hands an hour that would be an average of one dealt 4 to Flush every 2 1/2 minutes.  But over a small amount of play (a few minutes) it could be substantially more or less.

[pokeherguy]

I agree that during a small amount of play you may see more or less of any occurance but over an extended period of play things should average out. The "four cards to the flush" were abundant and consistent everytime I played there. In 15 years of play at Harrah's I never even thought about "4 cards to the flush" off the draw.