just curious: what’s the best success rate one can hope for in playing the standard Win95 Solitaire game? say, with 3 card draw and vegas rules. also, is it even worth it to play this in vegas? is the money involved similar to that on the computer?
Best success rate with Win95 Solitaire depends on how much you cheat. If you cheat a lot, you get a 100% success rate. If you don’t cheat a lot, you get anywhere from a 99% to a 1% success rate.
Are you packing for a trip to Vegas or something?
The SDMB legal counsel won’t allow us to give gambling tips.
It’s bizaare, but if I play Windows solitaire with single card draw vegas rules I end up making lots of money. Takes a while, but it happens. Last time I quit at around $700.
I should keep track to see if those spikes are outnumbered by the losses.
Maybe I should go to Vegas to play solitaire rather then the (apparently beatable) video poker.
In Louisiana, they published the state income from video poker machines in the newspaper every year, or six months. According to the figures, the machines paid out within a tenth of a percent of exactly half what they raked in. Those odds stink… although about the same as roulette, I think.
You’re confusing the machine’s ‘hold’ with the odds against the player. Most video poker machines have an edge of somewhere between 1% and 7%, if you play them perfectly.
If a million dollars is played through the machine, it will give back somewhere between 999,000 and 993,000.
So what about that 50% number? That the table ‘hold’, and it’s the difference between the cash put in and the cash paid out. So how can it be different? Because the machine pays out in credits, and people re-play those credits. For example, let’s say you put in $100, and after playing 100 times have 97 credits left. You play 97 times again, and now you only have 94 credits left. Cycle them through again, and you have about 91 credits. Etc. Eventually, you cash out, and in that state it looks like the average person cashes out when they’ve lost 50% of their money (or more likely, most people play until they are completely broke, or they win and cash out. The average of all this comes to a ‘hold’ of 50%).
But again, that has nothing to do with the odds of the game, and has more to do with the psychology of the players. A state full of compulsive gamblers would have a higher ‘hold’ as a state full of recreational gamblers, even if each state has identical machines.
Several lawsuits have been filed against states recently by people who don’t understand this simple difference. The state claims that the game only has a 7% edge, but they come across the 30-50% number and think something’s fishy and sue.
BTW, the odds in Roulette are 5.26% for the house for an American double-0 game. European roulette typically has one zero, which drops the odds to 2.13%, and also an ‘en prison’ rule which drops the odds in half again. This is why roulette is one of the most popular games in Europe, but it’s way, way down the list in popularity in North America.