The title of this month's article is far more than a metaphor or simple saying. Our topic is video poker-related software, and not only do they not make 'em like they used to, they did not, in fact, make 'em at all!

If you have taken up video poker as a pastime or profession anytime in the last three decades, it may be difficult, or even impossible, for you to imagine a time when there was no VP trainer or analysis software, and bearskins and stone knives would have been considered high technology. OK, pencils, paper and pocket calculators are all I'm copping to, and yes, we walked 30 miles to school in the year-round snow (uphill both ways).

To really understand the implacable & ineffable black box nature of video poker in the early days, it might be best to start with what the casinos and game manufacturers knew. Don't worry, it's a short list. We'll start with a story for which my current business partner was personally present. This is not hearsay or second hand information. This really happened.

The reason Royal Flushes do not pay out on an average of once in every 649,740 hands, is because people can hold cards and draw more of them. Once in every 649,740 hands happens to be the frequency of DEALT Royal Flushes, not the frequency of Royal Flushes after the draw. The true rate of dealt and drawn Royal Flushes is closer to 1 in 35,000. And though you may not find it in any history book, or Si Redd's Coin Machines company's (which later morphed into IGT) manifesto, when they originally created and distributed their new creation they had no idea whatsoever of the actual return of VP. In fact, they were off by a factor of twenty for their Jackpot frequency, which had apparently been nothing more than a not-so-best-nowhere-near-the-truth-guess.

Considering the run-away success of video poker, I'm sure we can all forgive and forget the brief period of slight ignorance that game manufactures experienced in the early days of the game. Nevertheless, here's the thing; it wasn't that brief or that slight.

Nearly a decade after VP's inception, I had the pleasure of meeting, getting to know, and hiring for my progressive VP team, a gentleman, who prior to his employment with me, worked as a game tester for a major game manufacturer. Apparently, even a decade into the life of video poker, the primary method for determining a games "rated return" was to fill a room with machines and employees and let them play (sans correct/any strategy) for a couple of weeks and tally the actual results.

I have heard many a VP newbie muse over the impossibility of casinos "putting in over a 100% return games" that (quote) "they'd never do because casinos weren't built by winners" (end quote). While possibly true, the reality is that casinos didn't put in games they knew to be a loss for the house. Originally, they thought they were a win for the casino, with games such as 5/9 Deuces being rated as low as 97% return in the official par-sheets for the game, which were based on real-life casino results. Of course, the "real life people" who generated those results were playing with no strategy, basing their card selections on...well nothing, actually. As it turns out, intuitive play on deuces wild games tends to generate a 3-4% error rate. Two Pair or Better Joker is the least intuitive game, with the difference between strategy and seat-of-the-pants play weighing in at a whopping 8% error rate, causing some casinos to put in 103.5% return games and back-room people when they couldn't understand WHY on earth the casino was losing. By the time casinos did figure out what the real return of games like Full Pay deuces was, when pros started playing them, the game had such a following they were afraid to completely remove them, and the bad press it would generate. Therefore, instead, they chose to simply remove the large denomination machines, which attracted the most intelligent players, and kept losses to a minimum.

Sorry to have burst your bubble if you happen to be in that club of people that thought casinos and game manufacturers were uber-intelligent nigh omniscient entities that never made mistakes and by whose will all transpires according to plan. These were ordinary people, sitting around a conference table drinking coffee (or non-alcoholic? beer), coming up with ideas, and then trying them out with a master plan as devious and well thought out as a four-year old child building his first sand castle. Not only didn't they know the math to figure out true VP return, the game manufacturers didn't know there was math that could figure out VP return (no kidding). They thought it was impossible, which explains their monkeys on typewriters approach that now seems so ludicrous. No modern VP game can even go into production in today's market without a combinational/permutational analysis of its return. So how did we transition from "impossible" to "required," with hundreds of thousands of home PC owners now able to do what once was thought beyond comprehension?