Thanks to all who responded; I played less than an hour while waiting for a seat at live poker, and was lucky enough to hit a couple quads and come away slightly ahead, while getting credit for some "slot time" on a low-pay machine 
Live poker went well too; for those who are interested, nice 15 table poker room with games from 3-6 limit to 2/5 no limit, 5/10 on Fri/Sat night, and usually busy, two tournaments a day. Poker comps go directly onto your TR card instead of being poker-room-only. Diamond lounge decent, and had "real food" (brats, chili, chicken fingers) at dinner time, at least the one time I went on a Sunday evening. Hotel was nice too.
--BG
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5a. Re: Expected return 8/5 Jacks progressive
If you didn't adjust your strategy for the progressive and
used regular 4000 coin optimal strategy, your expected
return would go from 97.298% to 98.244%. You can get
this by multiplying the percentage return contributed by the
royal flush by 5900/4000. If you play by perfect
strategy for a 5900 coin progressive, this increases the
expected return slightly to 98.325%. If you go a
little further and play using 4 perfect strategies, based on
the card or cards you are holding towards a royal flush, by
averaging the expected return for each of the 4 strategies I
got 98.356%. I'm not sure that averaging the results
of the 4 strategies is the correct way to get the expected
return, but it should at least be very close.
Technically, for hands that hold no royal flush cards you
would really need a 5th strategy based on the 5900 coin
average, but I'm guessing that it's unlikely that for those
hands there would be any difference compared to the normal
4000 coin strategy.--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com,
Barry Glazer <b.glazer@...> wrote:
>
> Traveling; I have access to 8/5 jacks or better with
progressive for royal by suit; progressives are at 4400,
4800, 6000, and 8400 coins, approx., for the respective
suits (which suits get which progressive doesn't matter, of
course, until you hit one of them).
>
> I suspect this is still far less return than 9/6
non-progressive.
>
> Can anyone calculate the expected return on a machine
with these four jackpots? Am I correct in assuming
that they are equivalent to a single progressive that is the
average of the four separate jackpots, ie, about 5900?
>