I used to love playing the dollar 9/7 Double Bonus game with a 4-way progressive at Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, Missouri because it had not only a progressive Royal, but the Straight Flush, four Aces and four 2s, 3s and 4s had a progressive, too. Even though the basic pay back on it was 99.1%, it didn't take much for that to climb over 100% if a few of the progressives had increased, especially when the Royal was at $4400 or so, which was very common. For example, if the SF was at $350, the quad Aces at $825 and the four 2s, 3s and 4s were at $440, the overall return is just over 100%. Believe me, I had those numbers memorized! Plus, I carried a conversion chart that would allow me to calculate the return fairly accurately if they were any different, so I always knew where I stood when I was playing the game.

Making a profit at this game was actually fairly easy - or at least as easy as VP can be - and I know a lot of other players who felt that way, too. That's probably why the games were changed when they opened their new facility in August, 2002. I can't say that I blame them; I mean it's kind of pointless for a casino to offer games where they don't make any $$$, but maybe they could have left them up for their old pal, The GameMaster (oh, sure!). What they did was take it from a 9/7/5 game (those are the one-coin pays for the Full House/Flush/Straight) to a 9/6/5, which reduces the basic payback to a miserly 97.8%. The only word to apply here is: Ouch! They did leave all the progressives in place, so at least there was an opportunity for the return to get over 100% at least at some point, but I knew these machines would no longer be a frequent stop for me.

With this pay schedule, a Royal of $4400, a SF at $350, quad Aces at $825 and $440 for the quad 2s, 3s and 4s offers a return of only 98.75%. And, because a lot of the "regulars" who were playing these machines won't be playing them very often, it's going to take a long time for the jackpots to build when the vast majority of the play comes from people who bet only $1 or $2 per hand. Well, that's okay, I suppose, because I really don't care how the return gets over 100%, just that it does. But there was a little bit of a social side to this bank of machines that I'll miss.

When I was finished rolling on the floor, kicking my feet and crying, "Woe is me!" to the VP gods, I gathered myself together and basically crossed those machines off my list of "good plays." And, to show that I'm not just a cold-hearted math fanatic, I shed one single, tiny, glistening tear in memory of some good times and some good wins. Hell, I've hit quad Aces on these machines for a thousand bucks and a Straight Flush for $750, but have never hit a Royal, oddly enough. After my little trip down memory lane, I got back to the cold-hearted math of the situation. While it was true that the casino had made the game very unattractive to me and others who play it properly, they had also "dumbed it down", which is an interesting idea when you think about it.

Unfortunately, the average gambler doesn't know how to play most Video Poker games properly. Certainly that's true in the case of a game like Double Bonus Poker and the proof is that there are many of them still to be found in U.S. casinos, despite the fact they return 100.15%, long-term, in the full-pay (10/7) format. The reason the casinos can make a profit on them is primarily through players' mistakes, which of course lowers the players' overall return. It doesn't take many mistakes to throw away a 0.15% edge.

I often see players at a 10/7 game get a hand like A,A,5,5,Q and they'll hold only the Aces, which isn't exactly a horrendous mistake, but it does cost them. In a 9/6/5 game, that's the proper play! An even more interesting play is for a hand like Ah, 10h, 5h, 6s, 8d. In the 10/7 version, the correct play is to hold the 3 hearts and that's because the Flush pays 7 for 1. However, if the Flush pays only 6 for 1, the proper play, by a wide margin, is to hold only the Ace although I think it's probably fair to say that the average unknowing gambler will likely hold the A,10, especially if the Royal is anywhere above $4000. In fact, it needs to be over $7000 for that to be the proper play, but the average player will gun away at the Royal and even though it's costing them long-term expected value to do it, they don't care! Hell, they don't even know what "long-term expected value" is because they're gamblers and they expect to lose, although they wouldn't mind winning now and then. And a $4000+ Royal is a pretty nice win, so they go after them in a big way.

Of all the non-wild card "bonus" games out there that are derived from Jacks or Better (Bonus, Double Bonus, Bonus Deluxe, Double, Double Bonus, etc., etc.), the game where the Royal shows up less frequently is Double Bonus Poker. For proper play in the 10/7 version, a Royal has an expectation of 1 in 48,048 hands and in a 9/7 version, it's 1 in 48,034. But drop the pay table to 9/6/5 and proper play will yield a Royal once every 40,864 hands, which is more in line with 9/6 Jacks or Double, Double Bonus. The only significant change is in the value of the Flush that in the 10/7 and 9/7 versions would cause you to hold all 4 hearts in a hand like this: Jh,Qh,Kh,3h,5s. I'm sorry, but the average player is not going to hold anything but the J,Q,K, suited. And, again, that's the correct play in a 9/6/5 version of the game and it will yield Royals more often, plain and simple.

I fully realize that an unskilled gambler will play the hands we've described the same way, whether they're at a 10/7, 9/7 or 9/6 version of the game. But the difference is what they'll pay for those mistakes. Certainly, it cannot make up for the lower overall return, but with no big penalty for going after the Royal, if nothing else their $$$ will last longer and ultimately more Royals will be hit on the new version. The casino will surely make a bigger profit - again, in the long run - but they may be paying out a few Royals before the "long run" shows up.

That got me to thinking about how to deal with all this by making some lemonade with the basket of lemons I was handed. Knowing that the game will yield a Royal more often, I structured a new "cheat sheet" to let me know when the return was over 100% and I planned to play it because, to me, a 100% return is a 100% return. And, if the casino wants me to hit a Royal more often, I'll try to accommodate them. If there are two games I can play and each returns 100%, but one has a Royal expectation of 40,000 hands and the other has an expectation of a Royal showing up every 48,000 hands, it's a pretty simple choice. Oh, I know that variance and other factors have to be considered, but 9 times out of 10, I'll choose the game where the Royal will come "early". All that planning raised my spirits a bit. I also knew that the "gamblers" might be having a good time with these machines by hitting a lot of Royals and that's nice. Deep-down inside, I was hoping that the casino would regret making the change, because it's a fact of life, or mathematics anyway, that casinos can have "negative fluctuations", too.

Well, to make a long story short, that may be what happened. I went back to Ameristar several weeks after the switch and the dollar games with the progressives were gone. They were in a multi-denomination machine (quarter, half-dollar, dollar) and all of the progressives had been switched over to appear only on the quarter games. Of course I'll never know, but I like to think it happened because they had to pay out a bunch of $4000+ Royals in the dollar game and somebody in the Slot Department freaked out when s/he saw they were actually making less $$$ than before!

So here's a tip to all you casino managers out there: Don't change your games until you check with me. (You think they'll call?)

Even if they don't, I'll see you here next time.