a 9-5 DDB machine with a progressive pay on royal flushes. Let’s take a simple example, a 9-6 Double Double Bonus Poker machine with no progressive jackpot vs. Can a game that’s lower-paying on its surface become the better bet if a progressive jackpot gets large enough? It gets trickier when extra elements are added, such as progressive jackpots and sequential royals.

But over a long time, the odds of the games will lead those with better pay tables to return more money to players. Losing streaks happen on the best of games, and a big hand or two can make you a winner on a coin gobbler. Your mileage may vary in any one session, of course. A 10-7-5 Double Bonus Poker game, where full houses pay 10-for-1, flushes 7-for-1 and straights 5-for-1, is a much better gamble than a 9-6-4 version of the same game. A 9-6 Jacks or Better machine where full houses pay 9-for-1 and flushes 6-for-1, will return more to players than an 8-5 machine. The actual return for a $10,100 meter is 97.75%, so pretty close.Which Double Double Bonus video poker machine is best?Įditorial Staff | Posted on Septem| Extras muddle the picture By John GrochowskiĮvaluating a video poker machine is usually pretty straightforward. The base return is 92.63%, so the total return could be approximated as 94.66% + 3.05% = 97.71%. In the case of a $10,100 meter, that is $6,100 higher than a non-progressive. My answer assumes the player follows the same 6/5 optimal strategy the entire time.Ī simple approximation for any 52-card video poker game is to add 0.5% for every extra 1,000 coins in the meter. Before some perfectionist writes me, as the progressive goes up, the optimal strategy will change, to be more aggressive towards playing for royals. So, $12,000 is still a long way away from break-even. For a $1 machine ($5 total bet) the breakeven point would be $5*2,906 = $14,530. Let’s call j the breakeven jackpot amount. The return of all the wins besides the royal is 0.926273. However, I like to use more significant digits that that, so let’s take the return, divided by the win, which is 0.020297/800 = 0.00002537. My table says the probability of a royal is 0.000025. The return of 6/5 double double bonus is 0.946569, to be exact.

Which video poker machin to play