Online Video Poker (maybe)

[4 of a kind]

One of the main reasons I stopped playing online over a year ago after playing Video Poker endlessly for a good 9/10 years, was the direct result of suddenly having such ridicules results endlessly for two years in a row. I was convinced the game was nothing more then a slot machine and my sudden change in outcomes (for over two years) was a result of the RTP being adjusted like a slot machine. I could only assume the previous settings were probably close to the expected 99.5% return since I certainly couldn’t tell the difference, or had any complaints regardless how much I lost during that time.

I tried like hell to find out how online Video Poker was really being dealt using a server, and most here already know what my endless efforts were able to confirm which was absolutely nothing.

I read this article today in Casino Player magazine and think it could shed some light on how Video Poker being dealt from a server actually works. It clearly explains the differences between Class 111 and Class 11 Video Poker machines.

I’d be willing to bet this is exactly how online Video Poker (and all other table games) actually works. Since there is no way to confirm how online poker (or any other table game) actually works one way or the other (except for hear say), I see no reason why not to believe it is a Class 11 program that runs off of a server.

Here is the article:

There are different types of Video poker machines and it’s a rather complex subject, but I’ll try to keep it brief. The video poker machines that you see in, say, Las Vegas or Atlantic City, are Class 111 machines, meaning the cards are randomly selected by a random number generator (RNG) from a 52-card deck. Once the initial five-card hand is dealt, you can hold whatever cards you want, and then the RNG will deal replacement cards from the remaining 47 cards (i.e., from cards that you did not hold).

Because the cards are randomly dealt, you can calculate with great accuracy the odds of getting a royal flush, straight flush, or five–of-a-kind in the case of Joker Poker. In addition, your playing decision (i.e., which cards you hold) does affect the final outcome of the hand. On the Class 111 machines, you can determine the return of the machine by looking at the pay schedule. For example, a 9/6 jacks-or-better game will have a 99.5% return (assuming you play your hands perfectly).

The video poker machines in NY racinos are Class 11 machines, meaning the results are NOT determined by random selection of cards from a 52-deck. The video poker (and slot) machines in NY are actually video lottery terminals (VLT’s). They work on the same basis as an instant lottery scratch-off ticket, meaning the terminal receives the next ticket from the lottery central computer and displays the predetermined outcome on the VLT. Therefore, there is no skill involved in VLT’s. All VLT’s in NY racinos must return a specific percentage (it used to be 92% but I’m not sure what it is now).

Therefore, even though players think they are playing a high return 9/6 Jacks-or-better machine (or in your case a Joker Poker machine), the pay schedules you see on VLT can not be used to determine the return on the machine. We can calculate what the odds are of getting five-of-a-kind on a Class 111 VP machine but we have no idea what it is for a Class 11 VLT machine.

[MaryJean]

One of the main reasons I stopped playing online over a year ago after playing Video Poker endlessly for a good 9/10 years, was the direct result of suddenly having such ridicules results endlessly for two years in a row. I was convinced the game was nothing more then a slot machine and my sudden change in outcomes (for over two years) was a result of the RTP being adjusted like a slot machine. I could only assume the previous settings were probably close to the expected 99.5% return since I certainly couldn’t tell the difference, or had any complaints regardless how much I lost during that time.

I tried like hell to find out how online Video Poker was really being dealt using a server, and most here already know what my endless efforts were able to confirm which was absolutely nothing.

I read this article today in Casino Player magazine and think it could shed some light on how Video Poker being dealt from a server actually works. It clearly explains the differences between Class 111 and Class 11 Video Poker machines.

I’d be willing to bet this is exactly how online Video Poker (and all other table games) actually works. Since there is no way to confirm how online poker (or any other table game) actually works one way or the other (except for hear say), I see no reason why not to believe it is a Class 11 program that runs off of a server.

Here is the article:

There are different types of Video poker machines and it’s a rather complex subject, but I’ll try to keep it brief. The video poker machines that you see in, say, Las Vegas or Atlantic City, are Class 111 machines, meaning the cards are randomly selected by a random number generator (RNG) from a 52-card deck. Once the initial five-card hand is dealt, you can hold whatever cards you want, and then the RNG will deal replacement cards from the remaining 47 cards (i.e., from cards that you did not hold).

Because the cards are randomly dealt, you can calculate with great accuracy the odds of getting a royal flush, straight flush, or five–of-a-kind in the case of Joker Poker. In addition, your playing decision (i.e., which cards you hold) does affect the final outcome of the hand. On the Class 111 machines, you can determine the return of the machine by looking at the pay schedule. For example, a 9/6 jacks-or-better game will have a 99.5% return (assuming you play your hands perfectly).

The video poker machines in NY racinos are Class 11 machines, meaning the results are NOT determined by random selection of cards from a 52-deck. The video poker (and slot) machines in NY are actually video lottery terminals (VLT’s). They work on the same basis as an instant lottery scratch-off ticket, meaning the terminal receives the next ticket from the lottery central computer and displays the predetermined outcome on the VLT. Therefore, there is no skill involved in VLT’s. All VLT’s in NY racinos must return a specific percentage (it used to be 92% but I’m not sure what it is now).

Therefore, even though players think they are playing a high return 9/6 Jacks-or-better machine (or in your case a Joker Poker machine), the pay schedules you see on VLT can not be used to determine the return on the machine. We can calculate what the odds are of getting five-of-a-kind on a Class 111 VP machine but we have no idea what it is for a Class 11 VLT machine.

It also appears that online Video Poker can and is controlled by the casino.
For instance I had recently had a stream of "good luck" and won three or four sets of 4 wild cards which is a pretty neat sum to win. I was able to cash out two times in a few days---BUT THEN I suddenly found that getting a single wild card was like being in the desert with no water.

It was VERY OBVIOUS that the wild cards had been shut down to near to nothing. After that I lost a quite a bit with not even any small wins. It was almost as if the deuces had been removed. Their percentage of play certainly was cut way down.

Just an observation of course, no way to prove it----but it was and still is very noticeable!

With wild cards it is very easy to see the difference, but in the Jacks games it is difficult to impossible to tell if they are manipulated.

IMO
MaryJean

[jod5413]

I have to admit that it would be really great to find out which class on line casinos use. Other than Slotland, which admits it is run like a slot game (Class 11 machine?), the other casinos all swear they are not run like slots. Why is it so hard to get a straight answer on this? With regulation here in the USA, I do think we WILL get a straight answer, another reason to hope for it. Although overseas they do have regulation and they have no answers either? I guess real card players would definitely NOT play if the case turned out to be the Class 11 machines?

Good find, 4oak!

[4 of a kind]

I contacted several casino reps from here and asked them to respond to article above. If I hear anything I will post it. Here is a copy of what I sent them:



Hello,

I found an article in casino player magazine explaining how Video Poker actually functions when operating off a server. Could you possibly ask your technical department if this is in fact how your Video Poker functions since your game also comes from a server?

Please take a minute and read the article which is posted here: http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/...tml#post449715

Thank you for your time,

Carl (4 of a kind)

[jstrike]

Well, 4 of a Kind...this got so long that it wouldn't all fit into a private message, so I figured I might as well post it in-thread...hope you don't mind.

Here's what I know. I've heard of the "class 11" video poker games, that are like the British fruit machines or the slots in Washington State, where the payouts are centrally determined. It's a pretty dumb idea, if you ask me. It takes all the fun out of the game. And I don't see the point of it. We set our odds the old fashioned way: Our machines pay out 8-5, and make no apologies for it . At least the player knows what they're getting.

I wrote the StrikeSapphire software my own way, and it's not exactly like what most other online casinos do. (I think 3Dice's system may work like ours, based on things Enzo's hinted at on the board, but I don't know). What we do is this: We have a master database called "hands". It's basically just a spreadsheet with five columns, and it's used for all card games in the system, from blackjack to hold'em to video poker. Column #1 has the unique hand ID of the current state of the deck. Column #2 has the ID of the table or the machine that the deck belongs to. #3 just has a one or a zero saying whether this hand was a new shuffle, or if the deck was carried over from the last hand on the same shoe. #4 & 5 are two big text fields full of cards, which are represented by two letters each with no spaces, like AS6HXD[...] where X is 10. The first one of these fields holds the original, fully shuffled deck or shoe, and gets carried over from one hand to the next until the deck is reshuffled. The second field starts with an exact copy of that fully shuffled deck and is reduced by one card every time a card is dealt (always the first card off the top), and whatever's left in that field gets carried onto the next hand if there isn't a new shuffle. Obviously in video poker there's a new shuffle every hand, but the system still applies. The purpose of having the second field is that we don't have to store each deck in the live game program. It's "stateless", which means that if the system crashed or something, it would stay in the database just the way it was left, and the game would pick up from there. It's also helpful because we don't shuffle between every two hands of blackjack -- we shuffle a six-deck shoe initially and just keep reducing cards off that second text field as they're dealt out, until we've used about 2/3rds of the shoe. At the end of every day, the results of the first text field (all the shoes) are automatically put into a new HTML file on our transparency page where players can go to any date since we opened and see all the shuffles for that day.

In other words, in our system, the cards are predetermined by the shuffle, just like they would be on a blackjack table with a non-continuous shuffler in a real casino. Most online casinos don't do it quite like what I just described. From what I know, most of them -- in video poker at least -- just create a new unshuffled deck for every hand. Then for each card they want to deal, their RNG spits out a number between 1 and however many cards are left in the deck, and the game program removes the card from that position in the blank deck and gives it to the player. Statistically, and in terms of odds and randomness, it makes zero difference whether they do it that way or preshuffle, but I like the preshuffle because it helps me keep cleaner records, I think it's more fail-safe, it's easier to show a paper trail, and it just feels more formally correct to me, personally. But I grew up around dealers and pit bosses when Vegas was still Vegas, and this is how I think it should be done.

Now -- it may be that some online casinos out there are actually not shuffling at all, but picking cards based on whether a central server wants you to win this hand or not. I don't know. It's true that once you start picking out of a new deck, it's a little harder to prove just how or why you picked that card next. But I do know that if you wanted to create that kind of system without shooting yourself directly in the foot, it would be a lot more difficult to program than a preshuffle or a truly random pick, and I think it's highly unlikely that online casinos are doing it, and here's why:

From a technical standpoint, a parimutuel or fruit machine / class 11 kind of system should work fine on a very-low-latency network, like the closed revenue network on a casino floor, or else over the state lottery's closed-circuit lines. But it probably wouldn't work at all for a casino that was distributed all over the internet, with servers in various countries where they need to be to make the system fast. It's damn hard writing even a single progressive jackpot for a slot under those circumstances. The main problem you get into with something like that is the latency/concurrency trade off, or what in programming is called a "thread race" or a "race condition".

Let's say you have 30 video poker games going on at the same time in ten different countries, and you want some central server to go "lose, lose, lose, win 1, win 2, lose, win 5..." etc. based on some expected RTP and volatility level it's trying to maintain for the casino as a whole. And then the local game server will take that info and choose the card that causes a win or a loss based on that. And for the sake of simplicity, let's say you don't care which player gets what, so you just program that central server in advance with a big list of wins and losses in some order that adds up to the right overall RTP. Now all you have to do is have each game server call up that central server and get the next win or loss off the master list, right? But it's not so simple, because there are ten other servers calling it at the same time. *And getting something off the list is a two-step process. First you have to read it off the top, then you have to remove it from the list. You can't guarantee that some other game won't call up in between and get the same number the server just gave out, before it gets deleted. Meaning it could give out the same royal flush several times in a row unless it's locked for the duration of its transaction with each game server.* So each game requesting the next win or loss from the list puts a "*read/write* lock" on the central server, telling it not to let any other game get a result until this result's sent, confirmed, and taken off the list. The problem with that is then latency. At the best of times, it takes about 200ms to send a packet from the Canada to the UK. About 300-350ms from the UK to Hong Kong. You get ten of those games waiting on each other to finish, and within a few minutes those delays would start to pile up to several seconds. When you get to the point where game 1 is waiting for game 10 to finish, and game 10 is waiting for game 1 to finish, you're in a deadlock situation and the system collapses.

True, they could just let each local game server run its own copy of the list, but again what's the point of doing it that way? Then they'd have to synchronize all those lists! All it would achieve for the casino is massive additional overhead...either way it's a self-destructive idea for the casino, and in the worst case it could bring the whole thing down.

Anyway, sorry to ramble on. Hope that helps a bit, at least give you some insight into how we operate if nothing else. I'm happy to answer any other questions you've got!

[Simmo!]

I contacted several casino reps from here and asked them to respond to article above. If I hear anything I will post it. Here is a copy of what I sent them:



Hello,

I found an article in casino player magazine explaining how Video Poker actually functions when operating off a server. Could you possibly ask your technical department if this is in fact how your Video Poker functions since your game also comes from a server?

Please take a minute and read the article which is posted here: http://www.casinomeister.com/forums/...tml#post449715

Thank you for your time,

Carl (4 of a kind)

It's probably worth phoning the software providers 4oak (RTG, MG, Playtech etc - Wagerworks already publish their RTPs) as I suspect the casinos who licence the software from them won't know the answer.

That said, I remember iNetBet stating one variant of their Joker Poker had a 100%+ RTP so maybe they are worth contacting for info.

[Nifty29]

Hey Jstrike.....maybe you could send some screenshots of your backend? (I mean your casino BTW....)

Maybe the other providers will follow suit and we can all learn something.

I think it is very interesting that you state that it is more trouble than its worth to rig video poker like that.......its what I've always said, the casinos don't NEED to 'rig' the games.....they're already intrinsically rigged anyway VIA the natural odds I.e. if you offer 36/1 for a 38/1 chance you're going to make money without any other interference.
Someone mentioned "not seeing wilds any more". Unless you count the number each session, it is impossible to make that claim and be taken seriously. When players have lots of nice hits with lots of wilds they don't complain that there's something wrong with the game because they're being dealt too many wilds. It's only when the odds and variance catches up with them and the wild wins dry up that they shout 'rigged'.

[jstrike]

Screenshots! This is what it looks like typically. What you see are the shoes as they were initially shuffled (you can see which are single-deck and which are 6-deck). Then on the back-end we can see how each hand was played. On a side note, the only decks we don't publish are the ones from regular poker games like Hold'em ...obviously, to maintain players privacy. When we get a request for hand histories, we run them through a program that shows the history of the hand as it was seen from the perspective of the player who made the request, so they can only see their own cards in the history, and other players cards that were actually exposed.

Picture 2.jpgPicture 3.jpgPicture 4.png

[4 of a kind]

Thanks for your reply jstrike, and it was very informative. Your points make a great deal of sense. But, since you could only confirm the way you programmed your casino, could it be possible especially with today’s technology that there is a more advanced hardware and software program that could easily overcome the delay issues that you suggest could cause problems?

I know from personal experiences after playing for years at the same 2 casinos that both sites would randomly be playing the hands much slower then usual on different occasions. This usually would occur during peak times like weekends. Could these lag times have been a result of the server waiting for its turn? Some times I would close out and re-enter the casino thinking it was my connection, only to face the same issues. When the delay became unbearable and annoying I would go to the other site and everything was fine, which might indicate the other site was busy.

We know all games are naturally rigged with a built in house edge, but this type of software certainly would give the casinos much more control of net profits.

Maybe some of the other reps I e-mailed could inquire about their software programs and respond also.



(Note) I re-sent the link to reps again where it didn’t post right the first time. Thanks for the heads up jstrike.

[Mousey]

The only problem with this theory (online being a class 2 type game) is that in all the hands I played online, I don't think I ever got the same cards I had discarded before the draw. Wait.... there was a weird VP at... was it Intercasino? where that would happen. But it was a known factor in the game. If online VP were class2 type machines, the paytables are smoke & mirrors.

There's a screenshot on the forum somewhere from a good win at a NY Racino. Discards had been re dealt on the draw. Typical VLT behavior.

However... I also grew uneasy about online VP the last year or so that I played, for the simple reason that online VP doesn't feel like the games I play in B&M. I also have the same feeling, but to a much greater degree, about online BJ. But my opinions and feelings are a moot point -- except for my personal decision as to what games I played online. Do I think they're 'rigged'? No. But it's my opinion that even though a 97% payback VP game may be 97% at the end of the year for the casino... I'm not sure about the way the RNG gets it there.

(disclaimer: I haven't played online in over two years)