As I was wandering around a local casino recently, I ran across an interesting version of Double-Double Jackpot video poker in a dollar format. This game, in its full-pay version returns 100.3% of all the money put in it, but this one was a multi-progressive version. The Royal, Straight Flush, and most Fours-of-a-Kind were all progressives, though the Four Aces with a face (1600 for 5) and the Four J,Q,K with a face or Ace (800) weren't. I might be confusing you a bit here, so let me show you the pay schedule of the non-progressive. full-pay version:

This is a damn good game, especially if you usually play 9/6 Jacks or Better, because there are few strategy differences. It can suck up your $$$ like a Double Bonus machine, due to the 'push' on Two-pair, but you aren't drawing to inside straights and three-card flushes like you do in Double Bonus, so it's probably less volatile. Also, Double-Double gives the $400 for 4 J,Q or K instead of 4 2,3 or 4 and that's a good deal, since you'll often hold a single face card, but will never hold a single 2,3 or 4.

Anyway, the game I found pays only 40 for 5 on a Full House and 25 for 5 on a Flush. That trims the payback to a miserly 96.6%, but the progressives can make that up, if they are high enough. I ran some quick calculations and made myself a little card to help me when I'm in the 'field' to figure where the return is, depending upon different progressive levels. Here's a copy of that card:

As my ol' friend, Jim from Memphis used to say, "Let me 'splain this to you."

The return for this game is 96.6% when all the progressives are at their reset levels, which is the same payout (ie., 800 for Four Aces, 250 for a Straight Flush, etc.) one would expect on a full-pay version. But, not all will likely ever be hit at once, so there's always some value in the progressives which raises that 96.6%. For example, the machine I saw had a Royal of $4900 (and added to it at a rate of 1%, which is very good), the Straight Flush was at $340, the Four Aces were $875, the Four J,Q,K were at $440 and the Four 2-10 was at $295. Now that I have my little chart, I can do a quick analysis of those figures and see whether or not I should play the game.

The Royal adds .9 X .46% or about .42%
The Straight Flush adds 1.8 X .15% or about .24%
The Four Aces adds 3 X .15% or about .45%
The Four J,Q,K adds 1.6 X .21% or about .33%
The Four 2-10 adds 4 X .75% (a little rounding here) or about 3.0%

Do you understand what I did? The Royal adds .46% for each 1000 coins over 4000 and, since this was a dollar machine, it had an 'extra' $900 on it, so I just multiplied .9 times .46 to get .42%. The Four 2-10 progressive had almost 4 $25 'increments' extra, so I just rounded a bit and got 3%.

That totals approximately 4.45%, bringing the long term return to about 101%. But remember that most of the gain came from the Four 2-10, so whether I hit them or if someone else did, the game would go down to a 98% return at that point. I didn't know all that, of course, because I hadn't yet made the card above. But, I felt is wasn't the worst I could do (though I was later surprised to see how low the 'base' return was). As it turned out, I hit the Royal, so it was a good night.