#1looks pretty good, doesn't it? It pays as much or more than #2 in every hand except the 4 of-a-kind, but that's where they get you. In a Deuces game, the probability of getting 4K is 6.494% or once every 15 hands or so. With a payback of 25 coins, 4K will return about 32.47% of all the money you put in the machine. With a payback of only 20 coins, that's cut to 25.98%, a loss of 6.5% in total return. Since full-pay Deuces returns 100.7% long term, the change in the 4K payback drops the return to 94.2%! Now on #1, they've upped some of the other payouts to increase the payback somewhat, but even with those, it still only has a long term return of 96.7%. That's not a video poker machine; it's a vacuum cleaner.

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