Pick’em Poker, an Excellent Second Choice

By Cap Richards, September, 2003

At the July meeting of Skip’s VP-Mail group at the Las Vegas Hilton, I spent my playing time concentrating on All American Poker, but was lucky enough to observe another member of the group (let’s call her Ms. T) playing Pick’em at the SpaceQuest Bar. I had never paid much attention to Pick’em, since games with higher expected returns are available at the casinos that my wife Meg and I frequent. Ms. T demonstrated to me that Pick’em is an excellent game to know, particularly when you need to build up your comp account quickly. If you are a player whose bankroll just won’t support playing dollars at other Video Poker games, you might consider dollar Pick’em because of its relatively low bankroll requirement. Pick’em is very widely available, and in many venues is the best game provided. Finally, because the play of Pick’em is so different, you may be able to learn Pick’em strategy very well without interfering with your playing speed at your favorite VP game.

Here is the frequency/payoff/contribution table for Pick’em assuming perfect play and that you always play maximum coins:

This data shows:

• Perfect Play Expected Return is 99.95% before comps.
• A Royal Flush occurs once in about 352,000 hands. The bad news – you may never get one. The good news – the contribution to expected return is only 0.34%, much less than the 2% typical for other VP games.
• A Straight Flush occurs once in about 38,500 hands. This is close to a Royal Flush cycle in other VP games. The contribution to expected return is 0.62%. So expected return excluding Royals and Straight Flushes is almost exactly 99%. This is substantially better than the 98%-98.5% expected return excluding just Royals for other VP games.
• Quads occur once in about 2,400 hands

Watching Ms. T play Pick’em, it also became obvious that:

• You can play Pick’em much faster than other games. You can scan the dealt cards quickly, the strategy is fairly simple, and you only push one button to choose your cards and play the hand. I think a reasonable estimate is that you can play Pick’em twice as fast as you play other VP games. One consequence is that if your Pick’em play rate is 1,200 hands per hour, you can expect a straight flush every 32 hours.
• Since Royals and Straight Flushes occur rarely, Quads are important. In quarter Pick’em Quads pay $150. If your play rate is 1,200 hands per hour, you can expect Quads every two hours.

For those of you who have never played Pick’em, here is a brief introduction. This is what the screen looks like when you deal a hand:

To play the hand, you push one of the two buttons, indicating that you want to hold that stack. The other stack is then discarded, and the two hidden cards are exposed to complete the hand. As you will infer, the Jack is the correct pick in this case. The result might look like this:

So in Pick’em, you choose between two three-card hands:

• Cards one, two and three, or
• Cards one, two and four.

Unlike other VP games, dealt Quads are a bummer. You have to discard one of them:

A very good hand	A very painful hand

You also have to remind yourself that a pair of 9’s is a winner:

A very good hand	A much weaker hand

When I got home to Nashville, I was motivated by this experience to create a Pick’em version of Video Poker Wizard Coach. Here is the strategy table for this version:

The strategy table is in some ways similar to that for All American Poker in that you are constantly looking for straights, inside straights, and double inside straights. The good news is that the strategy table is much shorter than that for All American poker.
It is also nice that there are no penalty-card situations. This means we can avoid any arguments about the merits of tracking them.
With the help of Ms. T and other distinguished members of VP-Mail, we have completed beta testing, and the Pick’em version is now available.

Cap Richards, CVPN (Certified Video Poker Nut) is the creator of Video Poker Wizard Coach, Training and Practice Software at www.VideoPokerWizard.com (“Speed Training for Video Poker Players”). He is a Principal in an Investment Advisory Firm, President of a Small Internet Services Provider, and formerly President of a company that provides software design and development tools to large corporations and government agencies. Cap and his wife Meg live near Nashville, and visit Las Vegas not nearly as often as they would like. Contact Cap at CapRichards@VideoPokerWizard.com.