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Gaming Guru
A Million-to-One Odds and that One Player in a Million26 November 2001
My chum, Charlie, was mewling about this very state of affairs a few weeks ago, as I found him meandering aimlessly down the video poker aisles of The Beachcomber. "Jefe," he whined, "they're killin' me. I put $20 into a quarter jacks-or-better machine and ran through the whole thing, five coins at a time, without one hit. The odds against that must be at least a million-to-one." "Hmmm," I sympathized. "Muy mal, amigo. I don't think I ever bombed entirely that badly. I wonder what the odds really are." So, naturally, when I got home, I revved up my computer to do the ciphers. Charlie's pretty good at video poker. So his chance of any return at all, based on expert strategy, should be 45.44 percent, give or take. What would be expected if a million players, each this proficient, fed $20 into quarter machines and bet five coins per round? It turns out that 62 out of the million could count on no hits whatsoever. Not quite the odds of a million-to-one that Charlie speculated. But not far off, either. Number of players out of a million expecting
At the happy end of the scale, three out of a million can expect a return of some kind on every round. Conversely, essentially none ought to hold their breaths for 16 winning hands in a row. The table also shows intermediate numbers of hits. For instance, 183,688 out of a million players can anticipate any return - from a push on up - exactly eight times in 16 tries. Only 15,732 out of a million are projected to get precisely eight actual wins, as opposed to returns comprising pushes, in 16 tries. And a mere 112 can expect eight hands ranked as triplets or better. I discussed this with a blackjack buddy, who smugly said "that's what he deserves for playing the machines." So I ran blackjack numbers, too. With six tablemates in an eight-deck game, you'll average about 16 rounds per shoe. Out of a million players, 35 can expect to lose and six to win all 16, respectively. Better than video poker. But hardly sufficient to merit bragging rights. And, one video poker hit could conceivably pay 800-for-1, while blackjack by and large yields only even money. The poet, Sumner A Ingmark, had these wise words about certain fine distinctions: When a chance is small enough, Recent Articles
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