VP Guaranteed Play

SleightOfHand

SleightOfHand

Well-Known Member
I am a little confused about a VP promo offered at the Station Casinos.

http://www.stationcasinos.com/pdf/GPbrochure.pdf

For $40, I can play 200 hands playing at max credits, which means I am playing 20 cents a hand which is normally priced at $1.25. However, I can only cash out when I have a positive credit balance, meaning that if I lost $20 in credits after 200 hands, I actually lose $40. Is this promo worth it?
 
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Guynoire

Well-Known Member
Heres my attempt, this promotion is analogous to buying a $20 call with a strike price of 0.

The expected value of the promotion is:
Sum over x ΣP(x)f(x)
where P(x) = equals the probability distribution after 75/125
f(x)= (x-20) if x> 0
-20 if x< 0

The hard part is finding p(x), since video poker has such a skewed distribution it doesn't converge to anything well known in only 100 hands so you really have to sim it.

I used video poker for winners to try to simulate the promotions. Intuitively you can guess that the higher variance of the game the better the return. You can also guess that the strategy the program uses is not the optimum strategy for the promotion because the optimum strategy would increase variance in response to the biased profit function. You could increase expected value by creating your own strategy but I don't want to write my own computer program, it's not worth it.

First I tried Jacks or Better, the lowest variance game for 125 hands and got a negative expected value of about $8.

I also simulated triple double bonus, the highest variance game I know of and got a positive expected value of about $1 for both 75 hands at quarters and 100 hands at dollars. Increasing hands lowers variance and decreases advantage.

If you're restricted to the games that are pictured on the brochure then the highest variance game is Double Double Bonus for a negative expected value of about $3.

To me this seems like a bad promotion, the maximum expected return is about $1, if they even have triple double bonus, for ridiculous variance. You're better off just playing the Full Pay Deuces Wild, 100.7%, at Stations.
 
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actuary

Well-Known Member
From the wizard's site, you can play the game here to get an idea of how it works. The brochure does a poor job describing the game, in my opinion. (Dead link: http://www.guaranteedplay.com/vpdemo/)

The wizard's work on this game is now out-of-date since, from what I can tell, the old machines have been changed to the new models where you cannot have a negative balance. This is obviously better for the player and will completely change the strategy used to play. Also good news, this simplifies the optimal strategy tremendously!

That said, as far as I know, there is no optimal strategy out there for this game. Your guess is as good as mine. Even if there was one, it would be incredibly complex, since it would vary depending on your balance!

My suggestion is to NOT play this game yet. It could very well be that some variants might have a payout of over 100%, with or without comps, but without knowledge of the proper strategy, we can't get +EV. (That last statement is not completely true, there could be some promotions, like 10X slot points or cashback, etc that could get us to >100% with a mediocre strategy, but then there are probably better games for you to play.)
 
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