My tutor program says I'm playing Deuces Wild at 98.9% accuracy. Does this mean that I'm getting only 99.65% payback?
A reader recently wrote, saying, "I play mainly Deuces Wild because of the high payback and your easy-to-learn Precision Play (tm) strategy. I practice regularly on a computer program which tells me that I play around 900 hands per hour at 98.9% accuracy. Does this mean that I'm getting only 99.65% payback?"
Actually, it's probably not anywhere near that low. Many people make the mistake of simply multiplying the game's rated payback (100.76% for perfect play on full pay Deuces Wild) by the playing accuracy figure reported by a tutoring program such as WinPoker (98.9% in this case), and assuming that they are getting a very low return. In this case, the reader thought that he was getting only 100.76% x 0.989 = 99.65% return. This can be very discouraging. Happily, it's wrong!
Now WinPoker is an excellent program, probably the best available commercially for analyzing a game and for tutoring you to improve your play. Your "playing accuracy" reported by the program can be misleading, however, because it is simply the percentage of hands that you played perfectly. That number gives no consideration to the "cost" of the error (the difference between the expected value (EV) with perfect play and as you played it) nor in how frequently the dealt hand or its equivalent occurs.
It would be much better to look at WinPoker's report on EV achieved. This is a much better gauge of your expectation than the percent of hands played perfectly, but it's still only an approximation since you played only a limited number of randomly dealt hands. If you happen to be dealt and misplay several difficult hands, it could give you a false low reading. On the other hand, if you happen to be dealt mostly hands that you knew how to play perfectly, it could give a false high reading.
Worse, however, the program may sometimes indicate a playing error when you choose a play that gives exactly the same EV as what it considers the best play. One example is a hand such as 6c-7c-8d-10c-3s in standard Deuces Wild. The double inside straight flush draw (6c-7c-10c) and the inside straight draw (6c-7c-8d-10c) have the exact same 0.3404 EV. Choosing the inside straight significantly reduces the variance of the game, yet older versions of WinPoker insisted that the straight flush draw was the best play and counted the choice of the inside straight as an error. (This bug was fixed in version 6, which accepts either play as correct.)
Assuming that your "errors" are fairly typical of most semi-skilled players, most of those deviations from perfection are on very close decisions (that is, the difference in EV between your play and the "best" play is very small). Also, many of your errors may be on infrequently occurring hands, so they would have little effect on your long term payback. Thus, at 98.9% accuracy, I suspect that your actual expected payback is around 100.7% to 100.75%, which is in the range that I would call "optimum" for this game for a non-professional player.
If you are playing in a casino that offers 0.25% cash rebate from the slot club, and no other added benefits, then you are playing at close to 101% total payback. At 900 hands per hour on a quarter machine, your action is 900 x $1.25 = $1,125 per hour, so you have an expected average win rate of about $11.00 per hour. My book, Video Poker - Optimum Play, tells how to figure the value added by progressive jackpots. Remember, though, that these are all long-term averages. In the short to medium term you should expect some rather large bankroll fluctuations. |
