First off, yes I bought the Final Fantasy Sazh DLC. I am one of those guys. I figured that if Square Enix finally released DLC with one of their Final Fantasy games it must be awesome. And, well, it was awesome – but not in the ways I wanted it to be.
Just like you’ll read on any other posts out there, the DLC is basically a couple cutscenes, two card games, and a stupid miniquest with Chocolina. What they don’t tell you explicitly is how ridiculously BAD the logic is within Serendipity Poker (one of the two games).
It’s basically Texas Hold ‘em, but with some rules tweaked. It’s also notoriously horrible at the AI’s logic and therefore really easy to amass a TON of casino coins fairly quickly. I’ll explain both below based on my experiences.
The rule changes that I noticed (might be more, but these were glaring):
- Tie-breaks are not consistent to Hold ‘em. There are no split pots. If the board shows a straight (6-10) and neither person has a Jack, the pot should be split. Not so. If your opponent has a King and you have a Queen in your hand (neither play any role in the straight), you still lose.
- ‘All-In’ betting is LAME. If you push all in and lose, it doesn’t matter if your opponent had 300 coins and you had 30,000. He gets them ALL and you’re out of the game.
My observations:
- They bet based on the best hand on the table with their cards, even if ALL of the good cards are on the board (not in their hands). Example: They have a 5 & 7 (off-suit). The board flops two 10′s and a 2. They now have a pair of 10′s (the high pair on the table) and they *bet* like it. It doesn’t matter that they don’t really have a straight draw, a flush draw, or anything meaningful. This basically means if you had a 2 in your hand you are virtually guaranteed to win that hand.
- Building on that first item, you can re-raise these AI characters over and over. If you happen to land ’3 of a kind’ or even a full house on the flop, you’re golden. Keep re-raising them as much as you can. When you get to about 15-20% of their total coins, just throw out an “all-in”. At least one of them will call you, and you’ll win the pot 99/100 times. In fact, I did this on the first hand of a 10,000 coin match one time and got all three of them to call me. I won the entire match in one hand, netting 50,000 coins profit in 5 minutes.
- If you want to live on the edge and bet when you have nothing, you can tell what your opponents have when the flop hits. If they bet after the flop, they have at least one pair. If they bet aggressively, they almost always have 2 pair. If they check, they have no matches but are either going for a straight or flush draw.
- They almost never fold pre-flop, so after you get a hefty lead just pre-flop raise to the max every time and you’ll be able to push them around a bit more.
- If things go *horribly* wrong and you lose all your coins, quit to the title screen and re-load. Your losses aren’t auto-saved so you can re-start without having to rebuild your coin stash.
That’s probably not all of the observations, but it’s enough to get a ton of coins in maybe 2-3 hours. I went from 14,000 coins to 400,000+ coins in about 2 hours. Considering the Elixir is 22,500 casino coins in the shop (225,000 gil if you were to convert to coins), that’s a pretty decent investment to make even the toughest bosses in FF 13-2 a piece of cake.