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Poker Promotions
Slot Clubs Comps and Promotions
One of the most common promotions is a bonus on four-of-a-kind (quads). How much would be added to a regular Jacks-or-Better poker game if a casino offers to pay an additional 100 coins on any quads? "The Payoff Schedule - Jacks-or-Better" shows that the regular 125-coin payoff for quads yields 5.91 % of the payback. With no strategy changes, adding 100 coins to the payoff would add 100/125 of 5.91 %, or 4.73%, bringing the total payback to 104.25%. Perhaps more significantly, even the short-term payback (excluding the royal and straight flush) becomes 101.7%. If you normally play 600 hands per hour then you probably net about 500 after waiting for the hand pay of the extra coins, so your total action is about 500 x $1.25 = $625 per hour. Your short-term expected gain is 1.7% of that or .017 x $625 = $10.60 per hour, and your long-term expectancy is 4.73% of that or nearly $30 per hour! (Although this bonus is not enough of a change to affect the playing strategy, adjustments are sometimes necessary to best take poker cards advantage of some payoff changes. Such adjustments would obviously change the final hand frequencies and hence the payback calculations. In such a case, these simple calculations would indicate the minimum increase in payback.)
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And that’s just on quarter machines. What if this same promotion applies to the $5 machines? All else being equal, you would have a short term expected win rate of over $200 per hour and a long term rate of nearly $600 per hour.
Promotion of Royal Flush in Online Poker
Another type of promotion is a bonus on a royal flush. A typical such bonus is an extra $199 on a quarter machines, bringing it to $1,199, just $1 short of the threshold for a W-2G report. This would trigger a few small strategy changes, but the payback increase is quite small so we won’t go into details here. This time, let’s play Deuces Wild. "The Payoff Schedule - Deuces Wild" shows that 1.77% of the payback comes from the royal. The bonus adds 199/1,000 of that or about .35%. Adding this to the game’s 100.75% basic payback gives a total payback of 101.1 %. As you can see, this is not nearly as valuable as the quads bonus, and it’s also a long term as opposed to a short-term increase, but such a bonus is often the best available at the time.
Tournament Play |
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| Follow the queen in Poker
A Seven-Card Stud game in which the card (and all like it) that falls immediately after a queen is wild. If two or more queens are dealt up, the card following the last queen is the wild one. Thus, it is not uncommon for the wild card to change once or twice in the course of a hand. Also, it is entirely possible that no queen will show, in which case there is no wild card. Follow the Queen is rather unstable, so that high triplets make the only really good playing hand on the go. In loose play, most players will stay on any high pair until they see the first queen and subsequent wild card.
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There are lots of slot tournaments and blackjack tournaments, and more recently video online poker tournaments have become more frequent. There are two basic types of tournaments - those with a buy-in, which might be anywhere from $25 to several hundred dollars, and those with free entry. For a "free" tournament, the casino puts up the prize money, so your potential loss is no more than the time involved while your potential win is the top prize. These promotions are not generally open to just anyone who wants to enter holdem hurricane. They usually are part of a promotion package, such as a room and show, or to slot club members by invitation, so if you like tournaments this is one more reason to join every slot club you see. Occasionally, however, the free tournament will be just that - free. However, you may have to play elimination levels that require you (should you qualify) to remain in the casino for the remaining levels.
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