Ask the Slot Expert: A pair of video poker questions - Part 1

Question: In video poker, after the initial draw and holding four cards, is the fifth card fixed?

Say I’m dealt four to the Royal, does it matter if I wait a few moments before I hopefully complete the Royal?

Or no, the fifth card has already been chosen?

I’ve heard it’s a matter of machine age. The newer generation of games uses RNG to select new cards from a second deck, which to me means there is a difference in what fifth card will be drawn.

Answer: Your closing statement is correct. Ish.

Old generation video poker machines selected all 10 cards that could be needed to play out a hand when you hit the Deal button. The problem with this method is that the machine sits with a result locked in but not revealed. If you knew the RNG function, you could use the five dealt cards to find where the RNG is in its cycle and know the five replacement cards waiting in the wings. You could then pick the best cards to hold knowing which cards were going to replace the discards.

Wouldn't it be great to know that there's a Royal waiting in the replacement cards so you should throw away whatever cards you were dealt?

As far fetched as it seems, this cheating scenario actually happened.

James Maida, president of Gaming Labs International, said the following about this exploit at a seminar: Anytime a machine sits with a result locked in, it is vulnerable to being cheated.

As a result of this vulnerability, about 20 years ago video poker regulations were changed to require machines to select the replacement cards only after the Draw button is pressed.

The replacement cards you get depend on when you press the Deal button.

There isn't a second deck. There really isn't even a first deck. There aren't really any decks at all.

Manufacturers and regulators don't share details of the inner workings of their machines, but my understanding is that cards are selected this way.

The RNG runs continuously. When you press Deal, the program gets the current number from the RNG (polls the RNG). It maps the number to a card. That's your first card.

The program gets another number from the RNG and maps it to a card. It then checks to see if the card has already been dealt. If not, that's your second card. If so, it keeps getting numbers from the RNG until it has one that doesn't map to the card dealt.

Poll. Map. Check. Repeat until five unique cards have been selected.

For each replacement card needed, get a number from the RNG and map it to a card. If the card has already been selected for this hand, get another number. If not, use it as a replacement card.

In my high school BASIC programming class, we programmed card games by creating an array of 52 elements, one for each card. We stored a playing card in each element. Then we generated a series of random numbers to swap the cards in two elements. We simulated shuffling the deck.

There's no reason to go through all that rigamarole to select cards at random.

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