Ask the Slot Expert: Can video poker auto-hold be trusted?

Question: My wife and I recently spent two nights at Barona Casino in San Diego, and 90% of their VP had auto-hold enabled.

Are you familiar with this and if so, can the hold suggestions be trusted? Are they game and pay-table specific? Are they created by the machine manufacturers, or by the casino?

The slot people at the casino were extremely friendly and helpful, but could not tell me how the strategies have been arrived at.

Answer: I haven't seen a machine with auto-hold in over 20 years, about as long as it's been since my (so far) one and only visit to Barona.

I was doing an article for Strictly Slots. I don't recall how the assignment came about. I knew there was a quirk about the Double Diamond machines on the slot floor at the time. The different long-term paybacks available for the machine could be identified by how frequently a particular symbol landed on the payline on the third reel. I could play a thousand or so spins, count how many times the symbol lands on the third reel, and compare this probability with the probability based on the virtual reel layouts to determine which layout is in the machine and, therefore, the long-term payback of the machine.

This idea merged with a tour of San Diego's casinos and the article became a stab at figuring out which casino had the loosest slots. I hit three casinos: Barona, Sycuan and Viejas. Maybe they were the only three casinos in San Diego with Class III machines at the time. I remember that at least one of them had both Class II and Class III machines. The entrance to that casino was filled with games I had never seen before made by manufacturers I had never heard of before.

The amount of time it took to get to the casinos was a bit of a shock to someone who had only been to Atlantic City and Las Vegas. I couldn't just walk down the street or boardwalk to go from casino to casino. There was a lengthy ride between them. At one of them, there was a 15-minute ride from the sign saying you were entering the reservation to the casino itself.

I saw video poker machines with auto-hold at the gaming show held at about the same time, give or take a year or so. The machines appeared to hold the cards with the highest EV. I asked John Grochowski whether he found any instances in which the machines did not suggest holding the cards with the highest EV. He agreed with me. So, in our limited experience with the feature, the machines -- from this manufacturer, at least -- did seem to hold the combination of cards with the highest EV.

Note that I haven't said "the best cards" or "the cards with best chance of winning." This is a situation in which imprecise language can lead to problems.

Consider this hand in 9/6 Jacks or Better and, possibly, all draw poker games. You're dealt a straight, 9 through K. The 10 and the face cards are the same suit. Only the 9 is a singleton.

9♥ T♣ J♣ Q♣ K♣

The combination of cards with the highest EV is the suited 10-K. The combination of cards with the best chance to win is the straight. You can't beat a probability of 1!

There's no reason why a machine can't auto-hold the combination of cards with the highest EV. It takes only a fraction of a second to do the analysis.

My first try at writing a video poker hand analyzer took a long time to analyze each hand because I brute-force dealt all the cards remaining in the deck. I knew there was a better way because other people got their results in less time.

I remember where I was when I finally realized the quick way to do it. I was in the Presidents Club in Newark airport waiting for my Continental flight to Las Vegas. I took a break from reading Casino.

As the saying goes, "Sometimes I sits and thinks. And sometimes I just sits." In this case, I sat and thought about how I could speed up my analyzer.

It finally hit me. I didn't need to deal out all the cards to figure out the number of ways to hit winning hands from the combination of cards I held. I could calculate the number of ways knowing the number of cards left in the deck that could lead to a particular winning hand. Combination was the key word. Combinatorial mathematics was the way to find the best combination of cards to hold in a fraction of a second.

If auto-hold held the combination with the highest EV, players could be puzzled why the machine held a different set of cards on two hands that looked the same. Consider this example from Bob Dancer in a Las Vegas Advisor Question of the Day.

1. A♠ Q♥ T♥ 9♣ 4♦
2. A♠ Q♥ T♥ 9♣ 4♥

The mathematically perfect auto-hold would hold Q♥ T♥ for the first hand and A♠ Q♥ for the second.

The hands may look the same to many players, but they have a subtle difference. In the second hand, having the 4♥ in the discard pile instead of the deck reduces the number of flushes that the queen/ten combo can lead to. It reduces the EV of that combo enough to make holding the two high cards the better play.

Ernie Moody was granted patent US6565432 entitled "Auto hold video poker". (Who is Ernie Moody? You can thank him for multi-hand video poker and practically every other feature added to a video poker game.) The patent covers a game that gives the player two choices. The player can either play one paytable with mathematically perfect auto-hold or play a higher-paying paytable without auto-hold. I never saw a machine with this feature. The patent has expired.

Even though the auto-hold in Ernie's patent can be trusted, the consensus online is that the auto-hold on the machines in a casino cannot necessarily be trusted. Some posters say that they have never disagreed with the auto-hold while others cite hands on which the auto-hold was, to put it kindly, sub-optimal.

The auto-hold is programmed in by the manufacturer. The auto-hold has to be paytable specific. It it weren't, the Deuces Wild auto-hold might not hold a deuce, which you always hold.

My advice for auto-hold is the same as the advice that Tesla and other car manufacturers give for their self-driving feature: Drivers should always be aware of the situation and have their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over at any moment.

If you would like to see more non-smoking areas on slot floors in Las Vegas, please sign my petition on change.org.