For video-poker fans, nothing matches the thrill of a royal flush.
Seeing the 10, Jack, Queen, King and Ace of the same suit on the screen fulfills a longtime quest for most players. And it signals the start of the hunt for the next one.
Tom Wojtasiak, 65, of McKees Rocks knows how tough finding a royal can be. He's played video poker for more than 15 years and has yet to hit one. He's still trying, playing nickel and quarter machines a couple of times a week at Rivers Casino.
Mathematicians calculate that a royal flush shows up, on average, once in every 40,391 hands. As Wojtasiak knows all too well, sometimes it's a lot longer.
“You just keep looking,” says Greg Rogers of Center, who can't remember hitting a royal in almost 20 years of play.
Video-poker pro and author Jean Scott of Las Vegas reminds players that the 40,000 figure is an average.
“You can hit several in a short time, and you can have long, long royal droughts,” Scott says. She and her husband, Brad, have recorded 785 royals in their 22-year career. While high, that number is probably about the expectation for the number of hands they've played, she adds.
A royal is the top payoff in video poker, typically paying 4,000 coins on a five-coin bet. But video poker, in which players decide which cards to hold and throw away, is far different from traditional slot machines, where luck is the sole factor in winning.
A single-line video-poker machine uses a 52-card deck, and each card must have an equal chance of appearing. That allows mathematicians to calculate the best move for any situation. Video-poker players willing to study and practice can increase their return.
Even with Pennsylvania's stingy pay schedules, video-poker players who know elementary strategy can get a payout rate of about 97 percent, compared with less than 90 percent for standard slots.
Wojtasiak, a retiree who first visited Las Vegas in 1997, likes multiline machines, which offer a chance to win or lose on several hands at once — from three to as many as 100. The first five cards are the same for each line, and the player decides which to hold and which to throw away. Each line deals the replacement cards from its own deck.
Wojtasiak's biggest score, so far, is being dealt quad threes with an Ace kicker on a three-line Double Double Bonus game, which yielded a payout of around $1,500.
The down side of multiline poker is the cost. Each line costs five coins to qualify for the maximum payout for a royal flush. So instead of spending $1.25 per hand on a single-line 25-cent machine, a quarter player would spend $3.75 a hand on a triple-play machine — more as the number of lines increases. One option is to move to a lower denomination, betting nickels rather than quarters. However, lower denomination machines often have worse pay tables.
Another factor to consider with multiline machines is the volatility — how quickly you can lose or win a lot when playing 400 to 500 spins an hour.
“When you're doing good, it's very, very good,” Scott says. “And when you are bad, it's terrible.”
Players on multiline machines will see royals more frequently than players at single-line machines simply because they play multiple hands at once, according to www.WizardOfOdds.com, an online cornucopia of gambling statistics and strategies. A player at a 5-line machine will see a royal about five times as frequently as someone at a single-line machine.
In their quest for a royal, players should remember to stick to the proper strategy for their game. That means not throwing away a paying pair because you have three cards to a royal.
The WizardOfOdds site says a “royal at all costs” approach reduces the time between royals to about 23,100 hands. It also increases the house edge to more than 50 percent.
The best advice: Play each hand correctly, and the royals will come. Sometimes it takes patience. Just ask Wojtasiak and Rogers, still looking for No. 1.
As for Scott, she's looking for No. 786.
Mark Gruetze is administrative editor for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-320-7838 or players@tribweb.com.
