EH software glitch (old) discussion

[spearmaster]

Forgive me, but I never heard a credible explanation as to how they could think to add a non-random bonus game to what is a straight forward video poker double-up game. Doubtless the code they sent you (some weeks later) was plausible, I daresay I could have knocked up similar, had I been in a similar situation.

Don't want to rehash this again, and it's OT - but I guarantee that you would not have been able to fool me with the type of code I saw. I can easily tell the difference between sloppy programming and something that's been "knocked up", thank you - 35 years of programming experience in a variety of different languages does not lie.

[thelawnet]

Don't want to rehash this again, and it's OT - but I guarantee that you would not have been able to fool me with the type of code I saw. I can easily tell the difference between sloppy programming and something that's been "knocked up", thank you - 35 years of programming experience in a variety of different languages does not lie.

I'm a computer programmer, and if I wanted to produce such code I could do it, I could make it look sloppy or polished too. It's not rocket science! You've got a large code base, you add some more code in a similar style. And if you want to make it look like an accident, there are plenty of techniques to use, oops I accidentally used = instead of ==, or oops, I accidentally defined that same function twice and ended up calling the wrong one. Whatever. If you've programmed enough to learn from your mistakes, you'd certainly be able to reproduce some of thos errors. Here's a Video Poker game written in C. http://www.de.ioccc.org/2004/burley.c Somebody wrote that, no, not knocked up, in fact very carefully written in order to deceive the reader. But deception it is. Good luck figuring out what the paytable is. It's absurd to say that a casino with its neck on the line couldn't come up with something similar.

There is simply NO WAY you can know with 100% certainty that the code they sent you was the code that was in place at the time, or indeed even if it was, that they put it in by accident, then you are simply wrong. And for what it's worth, I never saw a credible explanation of what this 'bonus game' had to do with video poker double-up, nor can I understand why, having created this game (which must have been requested by someone, these things don't get changed by accident, if somebody was sloppy on their keyboard and accidentally changed a constant value, that's an accident), they never implemented it, or even explained what it was.

And btw let's not forget what their initial statement was:

http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/100251-post129.html

We have concluded our review of the game play and randomness for all Video Poker games. Although the doubling component of Video Poker is theoretically deterministic, it's common knowledge that there are varying chances for winning and losing when picking a card out of four, to play against the card that is dealt face up.

It's important that the frequency distribution of the cards in an adequate sample set are evenly distributed for each position in the doubling game. We have found, taking several sample sets over different and varying lengths of time, that they yield in our opinion, a non biased distribution of the cards.

In theory, the number of Wins versus the number of losses and (excluding ties) will converge to 50% over a sample set that is large enough. Should small sample sets be used to measure this metric, then results will vary as seems to be the case tracing through this thread.

We trust, that we have responded adequately and any doubt in peoples' mind are put to rest.

That was a load of crap, they were stating that the multi billion-billion chances (given a 50/50) game were perfectly plausible.

So please forgive us for not taking subsequent statements too seriously.

It's possible it was all done by accident, but I found the whole episode pretty stinky. Michael Shackleford reviewed it and concluded that there was no reason to doubt the validity of the auditing he was doing, because it had been going on less than a month and his audit was only month. This despite the fact that it was never disclosed how thorough his auditing had been - whether in fact Video Poker doubling was audited as a specific class of bet or not.

In summary:

1. Unprecedented in gambling history double-up 'bonus game' feature requested by somebody at Odds On/English Harbour. The code is written and 'accidentally' finds its way into the regular video poker bonus game.
2. English Harbour are told their game is short paying.
3. By amazing coincidence , the dodgy code is removed as part of a completely routine 'maintenance release' just hours before English Harbour do their own testing, which obviously shows no problems, and as a result they issue a 'nothing to see hear, move along now' statement, claiming despite clear statistical evidence, that nothing was wrong.

This points to me to, at best, to a hurried cover-up of their mistake.