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Full-Text Articles in Statistics and Probability
Optimal Conditional Expectation At The Video Poker Game Jacks Or Better, Stewart N. Ethier, John J. Kim, Jiyeon Lee
Optimal Conditional Expectation At The Video Poker Game Jacks Or Better, Stewart N. Ethier, John J. Kim, Jiyeon Lee
UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete list of these strategies would require a book-length manuscript. Instead, a hand-rank table, which fits on a single page and reproduces the optimal strategy perfectly, was found for Jacks or Better as early as the mid 1990s. Is there a systematic way to derive such a hand-rank table? We show that there is indeed, and it involves finding the exact optimal …