[ArchangelX]

Found another serious bug with Video Poker...here's the PM from my user:

I found a bug in the video poker game when you added the $25 and higher. I suspect the bug's been there all along, but I really only discovered it when I started playing with the bigger chips.

The bad part is that I don't think there's a way around it.

Here's how it works:

1) Start a video poker game.
2) Bet $1 by clicking on the $1 chip.
3) Let's say before you discard any cards, you already have a pair of jacks.
4) Click the video poker link across the top. The game will restart, but you'll have the same cards (with the pair of jacks)
5) This time, click the $100 chip.
6) You'll win $99 ($100 minus the $1 you bet.)

If you didn't get dealt a winning hand right off the bat, just play the hand out normally. When the winning hands pay out 99x normal payouts, you don't have to win very often to come out ahead.

I have a pretty good idea as to why this happens, but I don't think there's a good fix for it.

I suspect the game stores each player's hand and the current status of every game in the database. It would make sense to do it that way, so if the player closes his browser or reboots his machine in the middle of a game, he'll have the same hand when he comes back. You'd want to do it this way so people can't just restart their browser when they don't get dealt good cards.

The problem is, you also get to keep your cards if you get dealt a good hand. You can restart the game and change your bet while keeping your winning hand.

There really isn't an easy way to program around this problem. Either you have to protect yourself against one cheat or the other. Mine is probably the one people are less likely to accidentally stumble across, so it makes sense for the video poker game to work the way it does. Any fix I can think of can be fairly easily thwarted by using two browsers (or two different computers) logged in to the board as the same user. Leave one on the betting screen and play the hands with the other.

The only real fix I can think of is to completely rewrite the video poker game and have it work more like the RPG. The RPG appears to be a considerably more sophisticated bit of programming than the casino, however, so that would require quite a bit of work. It would be like writing another RPG hack.

I'm not sure what you or the developer could do to fix this, but I'd hate to see the video poker go away. It's my favorite game in the casino, and I was probably close to 200% before I found the cheat.

I just threw away 250K in the casino (in two pulls of the slot machine) in an attempt to take my name off that stats page, but it's still there. How often are those stats calculated?