Bob Dancer's position in his article is that machines with auto-hold should not have to provide the best strategy unless they are claiming that auto-hold provides the best strategy.
I have the opposite opinion. The problem is that the average person would assume that the auto-hold is providing them with the optimal strategy. I would make that assumption myself. The only difference between me and someone who wasn't knowledgeable would be that I would verify that auto-hold was using optimal strategy before relying on it to play faster. It's true that anyone with any knowledge of video poker would stay away from those machines. But I don't think that changes the fact that auto-hold by default should provide the optimal strategy.
I think Oregon's only defense would be to say that the people playing weren't smart enough to use optimal strategy anyway, and if they used their own strategy instead of auto-hold they wouldn't have done much better than what auto-hold told them to do, so maybe the damages would be reduced. On the other hand, if they were advertising a 90% return and people using auto-hold only got 87%, they can claim that they were misled and wouldn't have played if they knew the returns were lower than claimed. Also, by relying on auto-hold to provide the best strategy, they played faster and lost more money.
I think that the auto-hold feature should provide optimal strategy by default, and if it doesn't, it should have to be clearly disclosed on the machine. It's bad enough that many states ban casinos and then use their monopoly on gambling to provide games with poor payouts, but to mislead gamblers on top of that is especially obnoxious.
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Posted by: alan3262@yahoo.com
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