Video Poker Forum

Here's a question for the number crunchers that keeps coming up.   Assuming perfect play, the Jacks or Better royal frequency is about one every 40,000 hands.  Now I know that strategy is modified as a progressive gets larger.  At some point, I assume you start keeping Ace/10s and throwing away paying pairs to keep three to a royal.  Obviously the large Royal progressive jackpot offsets the loss enough to make this worthwhile.  9/6 Jacks is a 99.544% game.  If you don't get the royal, how much does playing this way reduce the payback?   Does playing this way reduce the number of hands between royals? If so, how much?   I've spoken with some players who always keep Ace/10s and throw away paying pairs to three to a royal.  They claim they get more Royals that way, but I'm not sure it makes that much difference.

You can determine the cost by checking out the tables provided with most of the software tutors that do hand analysis. Look at the return for whatever you want to checkout (AT for example) with the RF set to 4000 and compare it with the optimal hold. That is the cost of going for the RF for that hand.
 
The number of strategy changes increases as a RF progressive increases. As each one is implemented the chances of hitting the RF increases. IIRC, Frank used to claim about a 35K cycle time for his play on progressives but I know it can get even better. For example, a RF only strategy has a cycle time around 23K hands. Of course, the return for most games would plummet rather dramatically even hitting RFs that often.