Unbelievable video poker payout?

[Lonesome Gambler]

First of all, I'm embarrassed to say that I don't have the exact paytable in question. We were in the middle of nowhere, facing a long drive home at 2:30AM after an exhausting day, and we wrote the initial quirk off as some sort of gimmick before realizing that we may have royally (bad pun) screwed up. Maybe some of the VP guys can shed some light on this.

The game in question was your typical Game King multi-game, single-hand machine. The game select screen was similar to this, with only a few games being offered:

We initially stopped to look at it because my partner noticed that JoB payed 9/6 on the $5 denom. However, when we looked at the $2 and $1 denoms, the full house and flush tables were much higher (double digits) for 1-coin. The max coin payoffs were normal. Reducing the fraction, we end up with 6/5 for 1-coin, but like I said, the payouts were significantly higher.

About 45 minutes into the drive home, I realized that we had possibly made a huge mistake. Has anyone seen anything like this, and was it a programming error, or is there another angle to this?

 

[KenSmith]

I'm not sure that it is possible to set up the paytables with this kind of mistake. If it is possible, it would seem quite unlikely still for the 1-coin payoffs to be so substantially in error while the max coin seemed normal.
I suspect that you were somehow confused.

Mistakes do happen on paytables, but they are usually just a wrong choice among the possible standard settings.

If you get a chance to double-check, let us know the situation.

One more thought: If you weren't looking at jacks or better, there are other games that would offer double-digit single-coin payoffs in the middle range of the paytable.

 

[Lonesome Gambler]

Right, my first thought was that we were looking at a double bonus game or something, but it was Jacks. It's possible that we were just very confused, but I'm generally pretty familiar with normal paytables. I'm sending a local guy out there to check it out, so we'll see.

 

[moo321]

It also may not be worth a lot. Laying down .25 per hand, even at a significant % advantage may not add up to much hourly.

Say it's 5% advantage, and you can play 1000 hands per hour, you'd only get $200 into action, for a whopping $10 an hour.

 

[Lonesome Gambler]

Well, with the payouts I was imagining, the edge would be extremely large. The hourly would be tremendous. Alas, as I suspected, this particular machine had a feature that I hadn't seen on other Game King VP machines that allowed you to play 6-10 coins as well, with the 1-coin paytable actually being for 6-coin. I knew it had to be something like this because, as Ken noted, the machines (to my knowledge) only allow for a couple of paytables to be selected from, rather than to be programmed from scratch. I had just never seen this feature on this particular machine before. Oh well.

 

[sagefr0g]

if the machine does allow six to ten coins, it may be that the advantageous pay table only appeared to be so.
i had a similar situation where i thought i found a gold mine, thing is though the first four parts of the pay table are visible for betting one through four credits, but the last portion of the pay table visible that you'd think was for five credits is really for a higher number of credits such as six or ten coins or what ever.
for this case the thing was to read the pay table for five credits in you had to manually set the number of credits bet, otherwise you see the first four credits bet and then the max number of credits bet.
can be a confusing situation if you haven't run into this very often.

 

[flyingwind]

Deuces Wild

I saw this pay table for Deuces Wild. What's the house advantage on this game?

4000
1000
125
75
45
20
20
15
10
5

 

[Thunder]

about .9%