CasinoGaming.com


	Sundays: Inside Gaming Tuesdays: Video Poker Wednesdays: Off the Shelf Fridays: Richard Eng, Player's Edge Saturdays: Pocket Aces

VIDEO POKER

Columns

• Back to Bob's index

• Back to columnist index

Bob Dancer writes a video poker column for beginners to experts. He also writes a column with Jeffrey Compton, "Player's Edge", featuring information on promotions at various Las Vegas casinos. Player's Edge is published each Friday in the Neon section of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Click here to send Bob Dancer an e-mail.

For more details and a schedule of Bob's free classes, visit www.bobdancer.com.

May 12, 2009

Bonuses Matter

I play at a local pub where they offer some bonuses. In Nevada, there are certain pubs where they offer up to 15 machines, subject to certain restrictions. Most of these pubs offer really lousy pay schedule. This one is one of the exceptions to that. And you'll have to find it for yourself because I'm not volunteering more information than is contained in this article.

The game they offer returns a little less than 100%, and the slot club returns 0.10% or 0.20%, depending on your tier level. They have the game in 25¢ to $10 denominations in single-line play and from 25¢ to $5 in 3-play and 5-play versions. (These are not Action Gaming Triple Play and Five Play machines. On the games in this pub you need to use a touch screen. If you want to hold all the cards on a 5-play screen you need to touch all 25 icons. The highly-patented Action Gaming games would let you hold all 25 cards with a touch of five buttons or icons, but the machines here have a different technology.) Although the denominations are as listed, these are all 10-coin machines, so it takes $2.50 per 25¢ game, $50 per $5 game, etc.

I was considering $5 single line or $1 5-play, both of which cost $50 to fully load. In many respects it doesn't matter, but in one unusual way it does.

If you play on the graveyard shift and hit a royal flush, you get a bonus of $550. This bonus stays the same whether you hit the royal on a 25¢ game, the $10 game, or anywhere in between. Since the $5 single line bonus is a little faster than the $1 5-play game, I assume I hit royal flushes about four times as often on a $1 5-play machine than on a $5 single-play machine. So playing the same number of hours on both machines gives me $1,650 extra in bonuses on the $1 5-play machine than it does in the amount of time it takes me to hit one royal on a single-line machine. This makes it a no-brainer to me.

It's important to note that the strategy for the games is different. For a $5 machine (10 coins), instead of figuring the return on the game at 4,000 coins, it's correct to figure it at 4,044. For a $1 machine, I'd figure it at 4,220, or for a 25¢ machine I'd figure it at 4,880. (I suggest you try to verify these figures. It's not difficult, but it is a little tricky because we're talking about 10-coin machines.) Without revealing the exact game I'm playing or the exact strategy changes I'm making, in many ways this makes it like a progressive where your strategy changes as the return on the royal flush increases.

There are other bonuses as well at this pub --- one of which is the Card of the Day where you get $50, independent of the denomination, so long as you're playing 10 coins. (Other bonuses rotate weekly, but a natural straight flush, full house made up of face cards, or a 5-of-a-kind involving 3s are fairly standard.) This makes it worth more to bet $1 5-play machine than the $5 single play.

Betting 25¢ 5-play would yield a higher percentage than $1 5-play because the bonuses for all denoms return the same $50, and for some players this is key. However, the game returns more than 100%, so betting four times as much increases the dollar EV even though it decreases the percentage return.