I dubbed this game "Fortified Jacks" because it has a lot of the features of a Jacks or Better game, but the overall payback for perfect play is 99.9367%, which is a notch above regular 9/6 Jacks that offers 99.5439%. Found at Cryptologic-powered casinos that use Version 4 of their software, the game is actually called "Double Bonus" but, as you'll see, it has more in common with a Jacks or Better game than it does with a "regular" 10/7 Double Bonus game (which returns 100.17% for perfect play).

The first thing you'll notice, if you are familiar with Double Bonus poker, is that the Full House, Flush and Straight payouts have been changed from a 10/7/5 format to 8/5/4 and that is obviously not a good thing. However, the payout on two-pair has been increased to 10 for 5, against the 5 for 5 that one normally sees in a Double Bonus game. Unfortunately, the payout for Trips has been trimmed to 10 for 5, but the "mini-jackpots" like Four Aces, etc. help make up for that in the overall payout.

What it really boils down to is that they have created a game that plays much more like 9/6 Jacks than Double Bonus, but you still have a shot of some of the "thrilling" hands that makes Double Bonus so popular. If you have played "regular" Double Bonus before, you may know that it a very complicated strategy is needed to get the maximum return from the game. You hold a lot of three-card flushes, inside straights and so forth, but you almost never do that in a 9/6 Jacks game. That's the case with Fortified Jacks, too. Let me give you an example:

The proper plays, along with the expected values for various games, are as follows:

Now, I know what you're thinking. Fortified Jacks is actually more like 8/5 Jacks, since that's what the Full House and Flush pay, but I want to use 9/6 in my comparisons, since many of you already know how to play that game and that's likely to be the strategy you'll use. Plus, there aren't many differences between 8/5 Jacks strategy and 9/6 Jacks strategy, anyway.

But back to the example above. You can see that the proper play for that hand in Fortified Jacks is the 9/6 strategy, not the Double Bonus strategy, and that's the point of this article. Not to confuse the issue, but you may or may not know that using the 9/6 Jacks strategy to play 10/7/5 Double Bonus returns approximately 99.6%, a cost to the player of about 0.6%. Using a 9/6 Jacks strategy in the Fortified Jacks game returns approximately 99.9%, whereas using the 10/7/5 Double Bonus strategy returns only 99.0%. Point made? Good. But you see, that's the beauty of this game, at least from the casinos' point of view. People think that it's a modified version of Double Bonus, play it that way and the best they can do is get a 99% return. But you, Dear Reader, now know better and can up your return to 99.9% with less effort, fewer mistakes and probably play faster to boot!

Most of the casinos offering this game (go to the GameMaster's Casino Directory and visit the Cryptologic Software page for a list) also have a cash-back "slot club" that returns 0.1%, so that puts your overall return at just about 100%. Combine that with the fact that we have never heard from a reader who has felt that they were cheated at a Cryptologic casino and/or failed to be paid their winnings and this adds up to a pretty good deal.

Okay, so what's the catch? One word: variance. Because of the cut in the payout for Trips and the fact that quite a bit of the return of Fortified Jacks is tied up in the various Four-of-a-Kind hands, the swings in your bankroll will behave more like Double Bonus poker then Jacks or Better. So, getting to the "long-term" will require more $$$, but the trip will ultimately end on a better note. If you play 9/6 Jacks with a 0.1% cash-back bonus, you're destined to lose at a rate of about 0.36%. (With me on this? Full-pay Jacks have a return of 99.54% and the slot club adds 0.10% for a total return of 99.64%). But with Fortified Jacks, your long-term return is almost exactly 100% so, while you'll have your ups and downs, if you hang in there long enough, all the $$$ you've lost should come back to you.

But why play a game that only gets you even in the long run? The answer is, of course, that you might get ahead of "the curve" right away and could stay there for a good, long time. Don't forget, the "the long term" in Video Poker is on the order of 4,000,000 hands. Naturally, the corollary is that you could get behind in the beginning and stay there for a long time. That could also happen in a Jacks game, but playing Jacks virtually guarantees a long-term loss.

But back to variance. The variance for Fortified Jacks is 31.99, for full-pay Double Bonus it's 28.25 and for 9/6 Jacks, it's 19.51, as calculated by the "Bob Dancer Presents Win Poker" software that is available from www.zamzone.com. But don't let those big numbers scare you, because variance is the square of standard deviation (SD) and when viewed from that point of view, the differences are a little easier to deal with. The SD for Fortified Jacks is 5.56, for full-pay Double Bonus it's 5.32 and for 9/6 Jacks, it's 4.41, all being based upon a one-coin bet. Still, you'll need more $$$ to go after this game, so don't think that a hundred bucks will last as long at Fortified Jacks as at 9/6 Jacks.

About the only big strategy change in Fortified Jacks versus 9/6 Jacks is to break up a Full House that contains three Aces and go for the fourth Ace. Since a 4K pays so much in this game, you will always hold a "high" pair versus a three-card Royal. The lowest hand you'll keep is a double-inside, three-card Straight Flush, just like you do in 9/6 Jacks. For a more detailed strategy, you should get the "Video Poker Strategy Master" software by TomSki. It's available at www.bj21.com and other online retailers, but you won't be off by much if you use your 9/6 Jacks or Better strategy card.

Even with the higher variance, I think this is still a better game than 9/6 Jacks, simply because of the long-term return (there are no full-pay Double Bonus games available on the 'Net, to the best of my knowledge). If you have enough capital, you can stay and play Fortified Jacks until the cows come home (or the reindeer, or koala bears, depending upon where you live) and you might get lucky.

See you here next time.

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