There are lots of scams in the world of gambling. Sometimes even large casinos cheat players.
But you know who is least likely to scam someone in gambling? The government. While the government might be bumbling, inefficient, corrupt, or overly bureaucratic, you still can at least count on them to offer you a fair game on machines they own, right?
Right?
Apparently not.
Read on for an amazing story of the state of Oregon cheating its own players at video poker... and continuing to do so even when caught red-handed.
Lose Your Money 20 Times as Fast as in Vegas
In 1984, Oregon voters were convinced to approve a lottery, to begin in 1985. At the time, a big selling point was that casino-style gambling would be prohibited.
Just 7 years later, the law was revised, and the first legalized, state-run video poker games appeared in 1992. 23 years later, they are still running.
As you know, Jacks or Better video poker returns 99.54% at "full pay", and somewhere between 95-98% on most other machines.
So what was the return on the Jacks or Better game on the video poker machines owned by the Oregon Lottery? 97%? 95%?
No. Their return rate was 90%. You read that right. They were offering the worst Jacks or Better video poker in the history of video poker. In fact, every variant of video poker they offered had a return rate of 90%, with the exception of two of them, which were 92% and 94%, respectively. So the very best video poker offered by the Oregon Lottery had a 94% return rate, which was already among the worst of the worst. And their typical machines offered just a 90% return.
How bad is a 90% return? At these 90% return Oregon machines, you will lose your money more than 20 times as fast as you would at a full-pay Jacks or Better machine.
But that's not the scandal here. While it's true that the paytables were MUCH worse than industry standard, and while it's true that players were not warned of this, you can at least say the game was still fair, albeit running at very poor odds. The scandal is the fact that, despite operating machines with a hugely inflated house edge, the Oregon Lottery still rigged the games to cheat people.
Let the Game Give You Advice... Just Not the Correct Advice
Video Poker is not like a slot machine. Slot machines require no skill. You click "Spin", and whether you win or lose depends only upon the odds of the machine and dumb luck. Video poker, on the other hand, requires the player to make decisions. These decisions will greatly affect the player's odds to win. To put it simply, a 3-year-old could play slots and have the identical chance to win as I would at the same machine. However, if that same child tried to play video poker, he would be absolutely terrible at it, and would lose a fortune. So correct play at video poker really matters. All strategy in video poker comes from determining which cards to hold, and which to throw back.
While perfect video poker strategy has already been determined and easily made available on the web, most casual gamblers don't know how (or care) to learn to play perectly. They have a general idea of what to do, but still make plenty of mistakes.
The Oregon Lottery machines supposedly solve this problem for novice players by automatically holding the right cards after the hand is dealt. While the player can override the hold suggestions, the player is led to believe that the machine is advising them correctly.
For example, at a Jacks or Better machine, if the player is dealt: Jh 8h 2h 3h Tc
... then the machine would (correctly) auto-hold the four hearts, and all you'd have to do is click the DEAL/DRAW button to try and make your flush.
On the surface, this seems like a nice thing to do for players, as removes the need to learn perfect strategy, and greatly minimizes the potential for mistakes. Who needs to learn perfect strategy if the machine is already advising you of the right play to make (and in fact already holding the right cards for you)?
However, there's one problem. The machines are not auto-holding the cards utilizing perfect strategy. In fact, the auto-hold makes several egregious strategy mistakes which will typically cost the player a lot of money!
Would you like an example?
Meet Justin Curzi.
Justin was playing video poker in Oregon in 2014, and found a perplexing hand.
He was dealt 2-4-5-6-7, with 4 different suits. The obvious play here would be to hold the 4-5-6-7 for the open ended straight draw. Curiously, the machine auto-held the 2-4-5-6, thus cutting his chances to hit the straight in half. He continued playing and found other mind-bogglingly incorrect auto-holds.
Convinced he found a bug, he contacted the Oregon Lottery. Marlene Messiner, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Lottery, drafted an answer to send him:
But before she could send it, her superiors corrected her. Messiner was told that they knew Curzi was correct, and that indeed the auto-hold was steering players (without their knowledge) to play suboptimally. She trashed that e-mail before sending it to Curzi, and instead wrote this:
Then they shut down the correspondence and refused to continue discussing the matter with Curzi.
He eventually filed a class action lawsuit against the Oregon Lottery, which is still ongoing.
He found the original draft of Messiner's e-mail through the discovery process.
Really dirty.
You can read more about Curzi's (justified) war against the Oregon Lottery here: http://www.wweek.com/portland/articl...s_machine.html
Curzi's process of discovery also revealed that the machines were paying out only 87% on average instead of 90%, and the auto-hold was mostly to blame. It turned out that the auto-hold was responsible for as much as a 5% difference in return on some machines. That is, players utilizing the auto-hold (which, again, is on by default) had a return of 5% worse than players using their own strategy, which is horrendous.
He also found that they were aware of this situation dating at least back to 2009, and chose to continue the same course.
Still not sure if you believe me or that article? Check out the Oregon Lottery's own website: http://www.oregonlottery.org/gameinf...ercentage.aspx
What's even worse is the fact that the expected payouts (90% on most machines) are required to be clearly displayed on video poker machines, so players can understand their odds.
Except it's far lower than 90% if you use its auto-hold advice.
Oregon Lottery officials are now claiming that the above disclaimer ("Auto hold ... do not necessarily result in theoretical payouts") is good enough to legally qualify as informing the players about the auto hold's deficiencies.
Yeah, right. Most players either won't read that fine print, or even if they do, won't understand it.
The question remains... Why does the Oregon Lottery have the machines set to give players improper advice on how to play hands? Obviously it's to cheat people, and these greedy assholes amazingly aren't even satisfied with their already horrible-odds machines.
They have no plans to abandon this auto-hold policy, and Curzi has calculated that the state has possibly scammed as much as $134 million since 1992 through this auto-hold trick.
Unfortunately, Curzi's class action suit is still likely to fail, because he has to prove "intent to defraud" in order to win his case. If they are simply trotting out games with a bug in the auto-hold, and then informing players about the auto-hold in a fine-print, confusing disclaimer, they can probably dodge being liable for damages.
Absolutely despicable.
Anyway, if you're in Oregon, stay away from video poker.
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