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Feature by Nat Royal
Flush Attack

In the winter of 1996, I became a serious student of video poker. Among the machines that caught my attention were the Sigma Game Flush Attacks, referred to hereafter as FA’s. The three pay schedules for FA’s are as follows:

RF, SF, 4K (2-4, 5-K, A), FH, FL, ST, 3K, 2P, HP:

1) 800, 50, [80, 40, 160], 8, [20/5]*, 4, 3, 1, 1
2) 800, 50, [80, 40, 160], 8, [25/5]*, 3, 3, 1, 1
3) 800, 50, [80, 40, 160], 7, [25/5]*, 4, 3, 1, 1

Flush Attacks are interesting because they are cyclical machines, hence the “*” by the value of the flush. For those familiar with the Las Vegas version, all FA’s in Atlantic City are unlinked.

How Flush Attack Works
Even though FA’s are cyclical, often you will not know where in the cycle you are. Assuming we start from the beginning, the flush has a value of 5 and we say the machine is in OFF mode. Playing max coin, you need to hit a total of three flushes before the words FLUSH ATTACK appear on the screen. At this point, we say that the machine is in ON mode. When the machine is in ON mode, the value of the flush increases four or five fold, depending on the pay schedule. Once the ON mode flush is hit, then the machine goes back into OFF mode and the cycle begins anew.

Continuous Play
Chances are you will walk up to a machine that is in OFF mode. (We will handle the most favorable scenario of walking up to an ON mode a bit later.) There are four flushes in a cycle, so the best (and most practical) thing to do is to take the average value of the flush during the cycle, and use that when coming up with a strategy.

Let me warn you that when the flush values get high, the strategy gets unorthodox. If you are serious about learning this game, you will need to desensitize yourself from patterns found in other games. I would also limit your repertoire to one other game at the most.

For the first pay schedule, the average value of the flush is (5 + 5 + 5 + 20) / 4 = 8.75. For the next two, the average value of the flush is (5 + 5 + 5 + 25) / 4 = 10. The former number may be a bit hard to work with, but it can be used to formulate a strategy in a program such as Tomski’s Video Poker Strategy Master.

This gives pay schedule #1 a drab return of 98.01%. Pay schedule # 2 has a more respectable return of 99.24%. Pay schedule # 3 has a slightly lower return of 99.19%. On the surface, the last two returns hardly rate as Atlantic City’s best—and that is the beauty of this game.

What Happens When Someone Has Already Hit A Flush (Or Two)
Just as a blackjack player back-counts a deck, a Flush Attack player should make it his business to watch the other players—while they are playing.

(NOTE: Standing behind other players, staring at them or engaging in any other kind of behavior for the purpose of making someone leave is not an option. If someone complains, then you will be considered loitering and asked to leave.)

Keeping a glancing eye on other players is beneficial. That is because if someone has hit a flush or two and abandons the machine, the odds become very favorable.

The nice thing about the “25” (i.e., flush pays 25-for-1) ON flush machines is that they become extremely positive if someone has only hit one, five-coin flush. That is because the cycle has been reduced and the value of the average flush increases from 10 to 11 2/3. At 11 2/3, the return on the game jumps to 102.37% for the second pay schedule and 102.31% for the third pay schedule. If someone were to get two flushes and walk away without putting the machine into ON mode, the return increases to a whopping 109.14% and 109.06%, as the flush has an average value of 15.

On the “20” (20-for-1 on flush) ON flush machines, this “play and watch” technique is not recommended. Your best bet here is to play abandoned machines where you are certain the player has hit at least one OFF flush.

What Happens When The Flush Attack Is On
From my vast experience playing this game, approximately one out of every 35 times, I was fortunate enough to encounter a game that was already in ON mode. For this scenario, you need to have alternate strategies when the flushes have values of 25 or 20. Although I should have had strategies for the flush at 15, I chose not to because it slowed me down and they did not come up all that often.

Your time spent at the machine when you encounter one already ON will be short, about 42 hands. The strategy is so radical that you never redraw, you can hold hands such as K-2 suited, and you never hold two high cards of different suits together. The return on a 25-for-1 machine in ON mode is 132.69% (132.57% for pay schedule 3) and 121.62% for the 20-for-1 machines.

“Harvesting” Flush Attacks
There used to be a lot more of these machines in Atlantic City, but when Trump World’s Fair closed in 1998 the inventory dropped.

As you can tell, randomly playing the 25 FA’s can easily be a positive-expectation activity. The occasional machine already in ON mode, the back watching, and playing a bank of machines in the early hours can lead to an “off-flush” count between 2 and 2.5. This is accomplished by abandoning the machine once you have hit on the ON flush. Your goal is to play as many different machines as possible, in hopes that it will not take three OFF flushes to get to the ON flush.

With cashback, comps, and a lower dependency on hitting a royal flush, these games can be quite juicy. I had a 2.5% margin on these games not including any cashback for over two years without being all that picky. Even the casual player who plays the 25-for-1 machines continuously can play these games over or very close to positive with the few tidbits in this article.

And that’s the “dirt” on Atlantic City’s best quarter video poker game—a game few people knew about until now.

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