Would this hand make Video Poker more interesting?

[JoeE]

Would you  play a game of 8/5 or 8/6 Jacks or Better if it included a hand called Royal Cousins (10 of any suit; JQKA, 1 of each suit) that paid half of a Royal Flush?The idea came to me while playing Multi-Strike Poker on my laptop.Whaddya think?

[BillyJoe]

Quick, sell the idea to Action Gaming..

[New2vp]

There are 96 different such final hands as opposed to only 4 final hands that constitute royal flushes.  Since these "Cousin" hands account for nearly 1% of all straights, with no strategy changes and assuming all straights occur with equal frequencies, this would add 4.19% to the EV of an 8/5 Jacks game, bringing its EV to nearly 101.5%.  Players should love it, but it might be a tough sell to casinos.I am going to guess that my estimate is quite a bit too low.  Probably an AKQJT straight actually occurs more often than an average straight, since the high cards are kept more often than the low cards, both individually and in groups.  And strategy changes would increase the EV even more.  For example, with KQJT9, you would toss the 9 and risk the straight payoff to try for the cousin payoff.Better try to marry the ace's suit with the ten's suit (or something like that) to get down to only 24 final hands.  That will cut the additional EV in 4 and may allow Cousins to be combined with reasonable pay schedules to produce EVs that would allow casinos to offer the game.

[shadowman]

One thought is you could lower the RF payout like on AC Jokers. That might get the game to about even.