Rival video poker

tennis_balls

Dormant account
Joined
Mar 18, 2006
Location
Albuquerque, NM
I noticed today that Rival VP has same paytable as MG (at least it's the same for dueces wild) They also allow you to play with smaller coins which is a good option for low rollers who don't like going $5 a pop for 4 handed VP.

I did find a small error with their autoplay (at least I think it's an error as MG wouldn't hold a 10 and 2 deuces) Also, if you get delt just one deuce I think you have to manually hold that card.
 
I did find a small error with their autoplay (at least I think it's an error as MG wouldn't hold a 10 and 2 deuces) Also, if you get delt just one deuce I think you have to manually hold that card.

Rival autohold works is a bit similar to Playtech. If it can see any winning combination it will hold these cards. So if you only get 2 dueces it actually pick a third card to held so you will have 3 of a kind which is a winning hand :eek:

Bascially I prefer autohold to be totally disabled if it can not hold correct. I like the 4-hand Rival VP though but it takes a little time to get used to the resizing cards. But my luck there really sucks. I have also been playing dueces wild and I estimate I have passed 2+ dueces cycles (8000 hands) at least without hitting dueces(or RF). Also JoB took my money very fast.

Only other place that has ever happened has been at Winward casino where I passed 5 dueces cycles (single hand dueces wild). Since both are properitary software it always makes me suspecious. No third independant company has confirmed it indeed is true VP and not slot-logic - or is there?

However it would take a lot more data to prove anything. But I stopped playing at Winward casino though for that reason. VP double there also felt wierd. Seems I lost too many times on the third double which is the highest allowed and and of course never hit the dueces. And the paytable was not even up that good.

For Rival I still believe I have been unlucky and I will hope my next bonuses will go better. The paytables are good there at least. 9/6 JoB and 'MG' Dueces Wild.

Zoozie
 
Rival autohold works is a bit similar to Playtech. If it can see any winning combination it will hold these cards. So if you only get 2 dueces it actually pick a third card to held so you will have 3 of a kind which is a winning hand :eek:

Bascially I prefer autohold to be totally disabled if it can not hold correct. I like the 4-hand Rival VP though but it takes a little time to get used to the resizing cards. But my luck there really sucks. I have also been playing dueces wild and I estimate I have passed 3 dueces cycles (12000 hands) at least without hitting dueces(or RF). Only other place that has ever happened has been at Winward casino where I passed 5 cycles (single hand VP). Since both are properitary software it always makes me suspecious. No third independant company has confirmed it indeed is true VP and not slot-logic - or is there?

However it would take a lot more data to prove anything. But I stopped playing at Winward casino though for that reason. VP double there also felt wierd. Seems I lost too many times on the third double which is the highest allowed and and of course never hit the dueces. And the paytable was not even up that good.

For Rival I still believe I have been unlucky and I will hope my next bonuses will go better. The paytables are good there at least. 9/6 JoB and 'MG' Dueces Wild.

Zoozie


Maybe Cocoa Rob can shed light on this situation.
 
Maybe Cocoa Rob can shed light on this situation.

Edit: I estimate I 'only' played 8000 hands (2 cycles) without dueces or RF at Rival. So this can happen, but still sucks. Sometimes I have also hit
2 RF without 1000 hands (not at rival) which makes up.

Yes, would be interesting how hear if any independant company has
tested Rival card game for 'randomness'. Not because I have any doubt yet, despite my bad luck, but simply because it should be industry standard to have that.

But I am sure they are intended to be fair. Because it can be hard to actually make a true random card game it should still be tested.

Grandmaster once linked to this interesting article:

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However for me personally I would prefer to have Winward casino since this is the only casino I have serious doubt about fairness, except when I played at English Harbour of course.

Zoozie
 
Rival VP

Hello everyone,

As Zoozie noted, Rival uses a "basic" auto hold for winning hands only. You may turn off the auto hold by going to the game options. We chose this as we believe it's more fun than having a computer play for you.

You may also turn off the card resizing/animation by changing the game to "fast mode".

The RNG used by Rival has been certified by CertainKey. It is based on the Fortuna algorithm which is widely accepted as a statistically sound source of random numbers. All of Rival's games depend on this RNG to ensure a random and fair game is dealt.

As for the number of hands placed by Zoozie, because you brought it up I thought I should clarify - you placed 1710 "for real" wagers in Video Poker (including multi line), and no fun wagers as far as I can see. This is quite a small sample size, and simply multiplying by 4 due to multi hand is not accurate. In fact, the variance goes up. Check out this article to learn more about n-line VP.
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Thanks everyone, and best of luck!

Rob
Rival Technical Support
 
Hello everyone,

As Zoozie noted, Rival uses a "basic" auto hold for winning hands only. You may turn off the auto hold by going to the game options. We chose this as we believe it's more fun than having a computer play for you.

You may also turn off the card resizing/animation by changing the game to "fast mode".

The RNG used by Rival has been certified by CertainKey. It is based on the Fortuna algorithm which is widely accepted as a statistically sound source of random numbers. All of Rival's games depend on this RNG to ensure a random and fair game is dealt.

As for the number of hands placed by Zoozie, because you brought it up I thought I should clarify - you placed 1710 "for real" wagers in Video Poker (including multi line), and no fun wagers as far as I can see. This is quite a small sample size, and simply multiplying by 4 due to multi hand is not accurate. In fact, the variance goes up. Check out this article to learn more about n-line VP.
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Thanks everyone, and best of luck!

Rob
Rival Technical Support

Lest we forget the law of large numbers:

Law of Large Numbers.
The Law of Large Numbers says that in repeated, independent trials with the same probability p of success in each trial, the percentage of successes is increasingly likely to be close to the chance of success as the number of trials increases. More precisely, the chance that the percentage of successes differs from the probability p by more than a fixed positive amount, E > 0, converges to zero as the number of trials n goes to infinity, for every number e > 0. Note that in contrast to the difference between the percentage of successes and the probability of success, the difference between the number of successes and the expected number of successes, n×p, tends to grow as n grows.
 
..you placed 1710 "for real" wagers in Video Poker (including multi line), and no fun wagers as far as I can see. This is quite a small sample size, and simply multiplying by 4 due to multi hand is not accurate. In fact, the variance goes up.

You are right of course. I had played 10K$ wagers and estimated about 2000 start hands at 4-line dueces wild, which gives the 8000 hands. It is only 2 dueces cycles and I also wrote myself it very very possibly and as you write variance goes up because correlation between the hands.

However passing 5 cycles in single hand dueces wild at Winward made me suspecious, but I do not know how to do the statistics. Anyway, this thread is not about Winward.

If I have not hit dueces at least in the next 20000 hands at Rival, I will start raising a small flag :)

I can see you also publish the payout% for the videopoker games under the help-page as for your slots, I appriciate this. The only other software provider I have seen do this WagerWorks. (virgin, paddypower)

I will do some reading about the Fortuna algorithm :)

Zoozie
 
I can see you also publish the payout% for the videopoker games under the help-page as for your slots, I appriciate this. The only other software provider I have seen do this WagerWorks. (virgin, paddypower)

I will do some reading about the Fortuna algorithm :)

Zoozie
Gamblingtools.net had a calculator that calculated the return of various VP games, unfortunately the site is offline now, but the same program can be found at
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and
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has tables for a host different versions of VP and various paytables.

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has some info on Fortuna, but you should probably get a copy of Practical Cryptography by Ferguson and Schneier, which is a great book.
 
I hit 4 deuces at Cocoa once, maybe twice some time ago. It was on the 4-hand version, and only on one of the 4 hands, with a lilliputian bet (25 a hand / $1 total bet) that I did not deem worthy of taking a screenshot of. I have not yet hit a royal flush there, but I do feel that their VP is fair. And I have probably played less hands than Zoozie has.

Just my 2. :thumbsup:
 
Edit: I estimate I 'only' played 8000 hands (2 cycles) without dueces or RF at Rival.

I have now played almost 2 more cycles of 'Dueces Wild' single hand VP at Rival. Those dueces kept evading me. But finally I got it, pat actually. Think I had to get it pat, since I could not possible draw to it :)

Zoozie
 
I also believe it's fair

I have played probably less than 1000 hands (1-handed), and I got 4 deuces after drawing to 2 deuces.
 
I did find a small error with their autoplay (at least I think it's an error as MG wouldn't hold a 10 and 2 deuces) Also, if you get delt just one deuce I think you have to manually hold that card.

I've come across this before elsewhere (can't remember where) and while it looks like an error, in actual fact the extra card held represents the best chance taking flushes, straights and the discarded cards into account. So you may find that while it's negligable, the % difference is indeed a small amount in your favour. It's only a guess in this instance, but if the two discarded cards were for example a 3 and a 6 of different suits to the 10, it would give you a small advantage holding the 10 as you have removed two cards that are almost entirely useless in any positive outcome (well, the 6 could have a very slim advantage at the end of a straight 6-10). If it discarded the 10 aswell, then you are reducing the chance of straights between 6 and Ace which all must include a 10. Dunno if I explained that well enough, but it makes sense in my head :D
 
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I've come across this before elsewhere (can't remember where) and while it looks like an error, in actual fact the extra card held represents the best chance taking flushes, straights and the discarded cards into account. So you may find that while it's negligable, the % difference is indeed a small amount in your favour. It's only a guess in this instance, but if the two discarded cards were for example a 3 and a 6 of different suits to the 10, it would give you a small advantage holding the 10 as you have removed two cards that are almost entirely useless in any positive outcome (well, the 6 could have a very slim advantage at the end of a straight 6-10). If it discarded the 10 aswell, then you are reducing the chance of straights between 6 and Ace which all must include a 10. Dunno if I explained that well enough, but it makes sense in my head :D

If you get two dueces and nothing else at Rival VP, then it will hold the 2 dueces and the highest card. This is a gigantic mistake actually.

Holding 22T instead of just 22 is an error of 26.98c (given 1$ total bet).
I believe it is playtech it reminds you of.

Zoozie
 
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My luck with their vp has been just awful this week. I know I haven't hit a four of a kind on the last few deposits, and I just blew another $150 on a 4-handed game with not even one full house.
 
no multi-hand?

oops! i thought Rival had dropped the multi-hand VP. i now see that they have just changed their set-up so one can pick a game (i.e. Deuces Wild) and then switch between 1 or 4 hands
 
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