> --- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "carter561@" <carter561@> wrote:
> What I do have going right now, however, is a streak of 176 (and counting) consecutive failures to complete a royal, drawing one card to a four to the royal deal.
>
Carter, 0 for 176 is certainly a long time between hits on a 1/47 event but the stat by itself doesn't mean all that much ( unless you suspect an illegal machine). During that length of play, how many royals did you actually hit? If the number of royals hit during the length of play is within expectations, it shouldn't matter how the royals get there.
Going one step further, if the overall return for the game is within expectation, the hand distribution should not matter. If I play 40,000 hands of JOB and get and get 2 less straight flushes but 4 more quads than expected, is that an unusual event?
You could take it a step further in the other direction. After you play 1.28 Million hands and have an expected RF count of 32 ( approximate numbers) you probably won't have 8 of each suit. If you have 12 diamond, 7 heart, 8 club and 5 spade, you could state that the expected number of spade royals in this grouping is way low and the diamond royal number is way high. The more conditions you put on a given distribution, the more likely you are to find deviations from the expectation and the longer the cycle to get to expected value.
I haven't taken the time to prove it but I would hypothesize that if you run a series of 10,000 hand trials, you can find an 'unusual event' in most of them. I'll have to define what an unusual event is but you get the idea.
With VP, you take a bunch of normally distributed events ( the various hand probabilities) and give them a skewed weighting factor ( the pay table) to get a decidely non normal function ( the return of the game).
The real 'random' part of the game is in the card distribution. If you take the time and record dealt hands for a sufficiently large number, the card distribution on dealt hands should match the expected value. So, if you record 5200 deals, you should see an ace of clubs come up about 500 times. The same with the rest of the cards. That is the real distributions you should be looking at to see if there is an issue. Once again, this is assuming no external force to influence the distribution.
