How would you play this hand?

I read about this in Casino Player this month....

Here's an interesting scenario in deuces wild video poker. For deuces wild, you don't get any payback unless you get at least three-of-a-kind, but remember that 2's are wild. Let's say you have the following hand:

What should you keep?

According to the card I use from wizardofodds.com, you should keep one of the two pairs, and it doesn't matter which. However, that isn't exactly the full story. It actually depends on the pay scale.
Let's say that three-of-a-kind pays 1, a full house pays 3, four-of-a-kind pays 5, and five-of-a-kind pays 15 (that's a pretty typical pay scale). The expected value of keeping just the pair of 7's is 0.5811 (you're expected to lose around 42 cents from every dollar) and the expected value of keeping both the 7's and the 3's is 0.5106, so it's best to keep just the 7's like the card says. (Keeping the 3's is exactly the same as keeping the 7's).

But if that full house pay goes from 3 to 4, that changes things. Now, the expected value of keeping just the pair of 7's is 0.6042 and the expected value of keeping both pair is 0.6809, so it is better to keep both pair.

Later on today I'll post the information on how the expected values were computed.

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