An introduction to video poker progressives

Bob Dancer, the leading video poker authority and an active player, recently wrote a column for the Las Vegas Advisor (www.lasvegasadvisor.com) about why he does not play video poker progressives. His reasons were mostly matters of personal preference. He did not say that advantage players or other smart players should not play progressives, and many of us do. As time permits, I plan to write several blog posts about video poker and other progressives.

What is a progressive? Simply put, it's a game in which a small part of the money bet by the players goes into one or more growing jackpots. Progressives can be found in slots, video poker, keno (live and video) and table games. The concept has virtually unlimited possible applications in the casino environment.

Why would casinos allow progressives, rather than keep the money going into the jackpot for themselves? First, progressives allow casinos to offer larger than normal prizes to players. A full-coin royal flush in most 25-cent video poker games is $1,000; the royal in a quarter progressive starts at $1,000 and goes up from there, possibly to $2,000, $3,000 or more. Second, progressives, many of which have signs showing the amount of the jackpot, create excitement and attract players as they see the amount they might win growing rapidly.

Sounds like a win-win. The casino offers players more, but with the players' own money feeding the pot. But in reality, casinos often aren't willing to divert even a small percentage money wagered without making up for it -- or more than making up for it. With video poker, progressives are often found on games with substandard pay tables.

For example, a casino might offer as its best non-progressive game 9/6 (full pay) jacks or better, with a long-term maximum payback to players of 99.54 percent. A progressive game might be found on 8/5 jacks or better, with a maximum payback at reset of 97.30 percent. A big progressive jackpot can make this a good play, even a better long-term play than the 9/6 jacks, but you have to know when and how to play it. More about that later.

First, let's talk about how you find video poker progressives. Often they are advertised by electronic signs. These may be simply show dollar amounts or contain other information, such as the donomination of the game. Often these signs apply to a group of machines feeding into a single progressive jackpot. Progressives are also found on idvidual machines, in which case the only way to tell there is a progressive is to look at the pay table. The web site VPFree2 lists and gives locations for the better progressives at many casinos.

Many casinos offer progressives at their bars. Often there is a sign above the bar, or two signs if there are progressives of different denominations (typically quarters and dollars). Individual machines must be checked to see which progressives are on them (often only one denomination per machine). On multi-game machines, sometimes only one game will have the progressive, sometimes more than one or all the games will. Usually the screen that appears after you push the "more games" button will show which games have the progressive, and sometimes the jackpot amount.

At many casinos progressives can be found on the casino floor. Often there are signs, some quite elaborate, above banks of machines with progressives games. But as at the bars, you have to look at the pay tables to find some progressives.

You can go into many casinos and find several video poker progressives at popular denomiations. How can you tell which ones -- if any -- are good plays? A huge jackpot alone does not make a progressive a good play.

First, you must know that there are several versions of most popular video poker games, and that changes in pay tables can have a big effect on the payback of the game. A big factor in finding good video poker progressives is find progressives with good pay tables.

But, as noted earlier, even progressives with relatively bad pay tables, such as 8/5 jacks, can be good plays. A big progressive jackpot can make up for lower return of the underlying game. For example, the break-even point of a 25-cent 9/6 progressive -- the amount of the royal flush that brings the long-term return of the game to 100 percent -- is $1,220. The break-even amount for 8/5 jacks is a whopping $2,166.

The break-even amounts, of most versions of most video poker games can be found in the Frugal Video Poker Scouting Guide by Jean Scott and Viktor Nacht (RGE Publishing, Ltd.), which also contains almost 200 pay schedules and the maximum return for each game. The return of different games, including progressives, can also be determined using the software Video Poker for Winners, which, like the Scouting Guide, should be used by every serious video poker player.

In the field, you can estimate the return of a progressive game by adding 0.5 percent to the payback of the base game for every 1,000 coins added to the amount of the royal flush. For example, let's say you find a progressive on a $1 15/9 "pseudo not-do-ugly" deuces game with the royal at $6,000. The return on the underlying game is about just over 98.9 percent. The 2,000 coins added to the royal adds about 1 percent to the return of the game, leaving it just short of break-even, not counting the value of points and/or other icentives the casino might provide. According to the Scouting Guide, the actual break-even amount for this game is $6,244.

It's important to keep in mind that the return of any progressive is a long-term theoretical concept. You will get or exceed that return only after hitting your share of royal flushes and other rare hands. This is not likely to happen in one or a few sessions or weeks or months playing progressives. In most video poker games, a royal flush occurs very roughly once every 40,000 hands. For a fast player, that's once every 50 hours. And that's the average. You can and will go multiples of that many hours between royals if you become a serious player.

In the real world, a 9/6 jacks progressive at break-even and an 8/5 jacks progressive of the same denomination at break-even are far from equal. You will lose a lot more money between royals playing the latter than the former. That means you will need more money to play the latter, to survive the deeper negative swings. If you normally play 9/6 jacks for dollars, you might want to consider 8/5 jacks progressives only for 50 cents or less.

Another consideration is that the optimum strategies for different versions of the same games are different. If you normally play 9/6 jacks and want to play an 8/5 jacks progressive, to get even the meager return of the base game, you'll have to learn some changes from 9/6 strategy. In either version of jacks, further strategy changes are needed as the progressive jackpot grows to maximize the return of the game. (The work required to learn these strategy changes is one reason Dancer does not play progressives. He does not usually feel comfortable playing any less than perfect strategy.)

For these reasons, I tend to be very selective about the progressives I monitor and play. I usually won't play for any length of time any progressive where the underlying game pays back much less than 99 percent. I also look for progressives on games with strategies similar to those of the non-progressive games I normally play. One of my main non-progressive games is 16/10 "not so ugly" deuces wild. I'm comfortable playing progressives on 15/9 "pseudo not so ugly" deuces, which has a similar strategy. The other progressives I play most are on 16/10 deuces, 9/6 jacks and 8/5 bonus poker (with a stategy similar to that for 9/6 jacks).

There are other factors in deciding which progressives to play, and even more in deciding when to start playing. I'll discuss those in future posts.

Further adventures in Reno

As I've noted before, my spouse and I got interested in Reno because several casinos there offer good video poker games at higher denominations than are generally available in Las Vegas. This weekend we took a trip to Reno for the primary purpose of earning Diamond in a day at Harrah's Las Vegas.

The spouse, who put in some heavy play a while back at the Rio in Las Vegas, got an offer for a free room for a weekend at Harrah's Reno and round-trip airfare for two. This was an attractive proposition because Harrah's Reno offers the best game on which to earn the 5,000 tier credits needed for Diamond status, though the game turned out not to be exactly what we expected.

I'll explain, but first, a little background. Diamond in the second-highest tier level in Caesars Entertainment's Total Rewards program. Most player reward programs have tier levels, but they usually don't mean that much. You might get preferred parking, a discount at the buffet or gift shop, and shorter lines at the players club. A few, such as Boyd Gaming's B Connected, offer players at higher tier levels all-the-time point multipliers, a benefit that has real, quantifiable value.

I am not yet an expert on Total Rewards, but many benefits seem to come to those who achieve diamond status or the top tier, Seven Stars. Among other things, these players get free rooms and show tickets without having to use reward credits. My spouse has gotten several offers for tournaments that require a hotel stay at a Caesars property, but as less-than-Diamond, she has had to pay the (pretty steep) resort fees on her "comped" rooms. These fees are waived for Diamond and Seven Stars players.

Diamond status normally requires earning 15,000 tier credits in a year. On most video poker at Caesars casinos, $10 coin in earns one tier credit. So the requirement for earning Diamond is $150,000 coin in. But, if you earn 5,000 tier credits in one day ($50,000 coin in), Caesars will give you a bonus of 10,000 tier credits and make you Diamond.

The problem is where to earn the 5,000 tier credits. Most of the video poker at Caesars properties is, by our standards, too tight to play. The best games in Las Vegas, at the Rio, require considerably more coin in that $10 to earn a tier credit -- as much as $50. But Harrah's in Reno offers 9/6 jacks or better, with 99.54 percent maximum payback, yielding a tier credit for only $10 coin in. This would allow us each to earn Diamond status at an expected cost of about $250, which equals one-half of one percent of $50,000.

Based on what my spouse saw on VPFree2.com, we expected to find $1, $2 and $5 single-line games of 9/6 jacks or better. The plan was to play for $2, betting $10 a hand at max coin and putting through $50,000 in five to seven hours.

But what we found was the single-line game only at $1. The only other choices were triple play and five play at $5 a hand. It would have taken a very long (and boring day) to put through $50,000 on the $1 game, so we decided to play the triple play -- at $75 a hand.

Unfortunately, we both lost a lot of money in a short time. The result could have been just as bad as if we had played all day for $1, but it seemed worse because it came in such a short time. I think we put enough money through that we didn't fall victim to a very negative short-term swing, and the fact that we were playing three hands at a time evened out our results some (decreased our variance, in technical terms). I think we made the right decision, though the price we paid was a lot higher than we had hoped for. It is normal for gambling results in the short term to vary wildly from mathematical expectations. Had either of us hit a royal flush on any one line, it would have paid $20,000, pushing our results much further in the opposite direction.

I'm going to start something new in these postings: tips to casino management. The first one is based on what happened in Harrah's high limit room when we finished playing and went to cash out our slot tickets. The employee said "pretty good" or something like that when presented my spouse's ticket for more than $1,000. She informed him that it wasn't good, it was what was left of a lot more money. I have had the similar experience many times of being congratulated by a casino employee on what was actually a losing slot ticket or stack of chips. The tip is simply to train employees never to assume based on the amount being cashed out that a player has won.

Finally, a word about Harrah's hotel in Reno. This place may not quite qualify as a dump, but it's pretty close, especially the East Tower. The casino in that building contains some very strange things, including a single bowling lane; an area that looked like a sparsely equipped basement rec room; a closed sundries shop containing a dusty old craps table and some wrecked fixtures; and what a guest told us was an abandoned noodle bar with an old banquet table and chairs. It's inconceivable to me that the latter two areas weren't at least walled off so guests couldn't see them. They made that area look like something from 'Hotel Impossible."