What If I only Played Progressives???
There seems to be a lot of confusion about why high progressives are good to play and where the edge comes from. Superficially this is hard to understand since the basic concept is so simple. Bigger is better. No one contests that a 9/6 JoB game is better than a 8/5 Job game, because you get more for the Flush and Full House. It's obvious. Where the disconnect seems to occur is when the extra money comes on an infrequent Jackpot. We would all agree that a job that paid $4,000 a month was better than one that paid $100 a day. It wouldn't matter that the one job paid out 30 times as often, the only thing that would matter was the monthly earn. Here the job that pays once a month is clearly better by a $1,000 a month margin. You could even extend the metaphor to a job that paid $8,000 every two months or one that paid $48,000 a year without confusing too many people. The same dynamic applies to video poker, it is simply harder to see because of the obfuscating effect randomness has on results.
Try this trick, imagine what if I always played high progressives?
In order to do this mental exercise you'll need two data points:
1.You need to know exactly how many jackpots you've hit in a period of time.
2.You need to know exactly what your losses were during this same period of time.
Notice I said "jackpots" not "Royal Flushes". You could use RF's as your experiment, but any hand will do as long as you remember exactly how many you got over a period of time. For instance, some progressives have meters for 4 Aces. One could play for high 4 Aces just as easily as they could for a high Royal. Progressives do not HAVE to be high on the RF to be playable. For this experiment I'm going to use RF's as an example.
OK so you've got your numbers. Now here's what to do with them to play the "what if I had played progressives" game.
1.Take your net loss and divide by the number of Jackpots you have hit.
2.Now add this amount to the reset value of the jackpot.
3.This is how high the JP would have needed to be for you to have broken-even.
Example:
In the last five years you've hit 10 Royals. You are also down $40,000 overall during that period.
$40,000 / 10 = $4,000
A Royal normally pays $4,000, so $4,000 + $4,000 = $8,000
Now imagine that you only played when the JP was over $12,000??? Same number of Royals, same losses, but because you got more for each of them a loss is magically transmuted into a win.
Another even easier way to consider, "what if I'd only played high progressives" would be to simply multiply all your jackpots by 3 and see if you'd still be down. At the very least, even if 3x wasn't enough to make you a winner overall, you'd be down a lot less. A LOT less.
Bigger is better.
You will not necessarily get more jackpots playing progressives, and you will have to take forced breaks from playing when someone hits the progressive (even if that's you), but when looked at from an equal amount of play you will be getting more for each jackpot.
I don't really recommend looking at the past as a predictor of the future, since obviously some people will have gotten more jackpots than they should have, and others will have gotten less. How many one should get is still the more important factor for making good decision in your future. The point of this exercise was to use actual results to illustrate the basic concepts for people that have difficulty thinking in terms of expectancy.
~FK