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Section: Advice > Gaming Tips Strategies
for Video Poker Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 Variations of Video Poker Machines Variations of Deuces Wild There are many variations on deuces wild, some of which are reasonable games. One variation is called Deuces Deluxe. Its gimmick is to pay more for natural fours-of-a-kind and straight flushes. Its return is 100.2%. A second variation is Double Deuces, which doubles the four deuces mini-jackpot and slightly increases the five-of-a-kind and straight flush payoffs. Its return is 99.6%, and its variance is higher than normal deuces wild. I have found a very few Double Deuces machines where the four deuces mini-jackpot is 2500 coins. This is an outstanding machine, with a 101.6% return, the highest I know of. It also has a very large variance. Both of these variations reduce the bread-and-butter payoff of deuces wild, the four-of-a-kind payoff, from 25 to 20. Not surprisingly, this also turns out to be the technique used by the many rip-off variations of deuces wild. You might think that if you reduce the four-of-a-kind payoff, but increase the payoff of the "more likely" hands like flush and full house, the net return would have to increase. The fallacy is that with four wild cards the normal hand frequencies are greatly distorted. For example, fours-of-a-kind are five times more likely than full houses. Another interesting machine type is the five wild machine, which adds a joker to the four wild deuces. The net return on these machines is 99.0%, which is rather low. However, the five wild machines have a very low variance. Thus, if you like the thrill of the inflated hands of the other wild card machines, but do not like their high variance, you might enjoy five wilds. Special Promotional Payoffs Sometimes casinos will offer special promotions where they give extra payoffs on video poker hands. These can be quite imaginative:
Are these worth anything? Remember, you are asking that of someone who advocates joining a slot club for the extra 0.2% return it offers. Of course they are worth something; look for them. Are they worth enough so you can quit your day job? No. Actually, if you are mathematically inclined, it is usually fairly easy to estimate the minimum value of promotions like these. For example, take the sequential royal flush promotion. The number of different ways you can order five things is 5*4*3*3*1 or 120 ways, so there are 120 different royal flush orders. Two of these are sequential. Thus, 1 out of 60 royal flushes will gain you the 50,000 coins. Thus you could estimate that the royal flush payout is actually increased to (50000 + 4000*59) / 60 or 4767 coins. For any game, you can use my tables to look up how much of your total return is from the royal flush payoff, and increase that by 4767/4000. You will get a figure 0.3-0.4%. But this is a minimum, because it assumes you do not adjust your playing strategy for the promotional payoff. Playing slightly differently will nudge up the return a bit. So how should you adapt your play? You can pretty much be guaranteed that radical departures from your normal play is not a good idea. However, you can sometimes "hand calculate" some minor modifications. Again using the sequential royal flush example, you can observe that if you have four royal flush cards in the right place, your chance of drawing the fifth is 1 out of 47. Thus this hand is worth 50000/47=1067 coins, not even counting all the chances at flushes, straights, etc. that you have. Thus, if you had a wild royal flush with deuces, worth 125 coins, discarding the single deuce should be a no-brainer if you could make a sequential royal flush.
Jeff Lotspiech is a Research Staff Member in the computer science department at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. You can visit his site for a great listing of the whereabouts of Good Video Poker Machines. All information
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