It may look like Triple Play, but when it comes
to the experience, it’s a whole new game
by Bob Dancer

     At first glance, a Double Pay machine looks very much like a Triple Play, Five Play or Ten Play machine. And no wonder. All of these games originate from Action Gaming—unquestionably the most prolific and creative video poker game inventor in the business.

      In terms of a player’s decision-making, Double Pay is played exactly like the Triple Play family of games. In terms of scoring and the video poker gaming experience, the games are quite a bit different.

      Let me explain.

      Triple Play, Five Play and Ten Play all work the same, except for obvious difference in the number of lines—for simplicity, I describe the Five Play version as a “compromise.”

      Look at Figure 1. At first glance, it looks like a typical Five Play game. But look harder and you’ll notice some big differences. You notice a full house at the bottom. But it is paying 250 coins! What’s going on? This is a 9-7-5 Double Bonus game (i.e. the single-coin full house returns 9, the flush returns 7 and the straight returns 5), so a five-coin full house normally returns 45 coins. Yet we are receiving 250. On the hand on the upper right, we are getting even money for a pair of eights. Very strange! And in the middle right, we are getting 100 coins for a flush. Something funny is going on.  

Figure 1

      What is happening is that these hands came out on the initial deal. Each of the five hands came out of a different 52-card deck, and the payout schedule is listed around the outside of the screen in red. Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker can tell you that the base game of 9-7-5 Double Bonus returns 99.11% when played perfectly. But the program doesn’t have the ability to evaluate dealt hands. I’ll discuss how to do that very soon, but for now, let’s get back to the explanation of the game.

      The 50-coin bet on this game is divided into 25 coins bet on the deal  (5 per hand) and 25 coins bet on the draw (again, five coins per hand). You may bet less, but you get lesser odds on both the deal and the draw, so if you are not in the mood to bet maximum coins, I suggest you play another game. Near the bottom it tells me I have won 365 coins on my 25-coin bet. Needless to say, this is better than average. After all, how often do you get dealt a full house?

      So far, all I have done is push the “play maximum credits” button. There has been no skill required at all. Now I need to play the hand exactly like a Five Play game. The correct play in Double Bonus, of course, is to hold the three aces and to “go for it.” Notice that we were paid for a full house on the deal and now we are destroying it. No problem. Our 365-coin payment on the draw has been locked up even if we do not hold the full house. We are now on Figure 2.

Figure 2

      What if we had seen the Ad in one of the upper four hands on the original deal? How would this have affected our chances to get four aces on the draw? The answer is “not at all.” The upper four decks that were used for the original deal become whole again. The five cards shown from on the bottom line (i.e. the three aces and the two fives) are removed from the original 52-card decks. The remaining 47-card decks are conceptually shuffled and the results are equivalent to the initial deal not even being displayed.

Figure 3

In Figure 3 we see “after the draw” results. One of the trips hands turned into four aces, one of them turned in a full house, and three times the trips didn’t improve. This is better than average for this draw, but not exceptionally so. And that is the game. We get paid for the deal, and then we get paid for the draw.

      It is easy to evaluate the “draw” part of the game if we have a computer program. The “deal” part of the game is tougher. Although the frequencies of dealt hands are published in many beginning “How To Play Poker” books, most video poker players are unaware of them. Let me publish them here, broken down by some categories that make sense to a video poker player, but not to a live poker player:

Figure 4. Frequencies for Dealt Hands in a 52-card deck with no wild cards

      I entered these numbers into an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and multiplied the listed pay schedule (and then divided by 2,598,960), and came out with the percentages. If you want to set up your own spreadsheet and verify the numbers, you are welcome to do so. If not, the correct final results are given here.  

    The interesting feature of these machines is that there is one unique “deal” pay schedule for each “draw” pay schedule, so just evaluating the draw schedule (which intelligent video poker players do all of the time anyway) is sufficient to tell us which versions to play and which to avoid. Here are the numbers:  

      These are the only pay schedules ever found on Double Pay. Notice that the top schedule on each game returns around 99% even. This is a strong return for most parts of the country. Professional players that insist on receiving over 100% before they play should give this game a wide berth. But for recreational players, the actual return on these games is higher than it would be on a “normal” 99% game.

      The reason for this is that the “deal” percentage and the “draw” percentage refer to two very different concepts. The “draw” percentage refers to how well you play the game. The average player plays about 2% less than this, so a slot director with a 99% game on the floor assumes it will actually return 97% to his players. The “deal” percentage is what actually happens. There is no skill on it whatsoever, although there is a very long cycle because dealt royals only happen every 650,000 hands or so. (Here, that is only every 130,000 original hands, because dealt royals can happen on any of the five lines.) So for the average player, playing the 9-7-5 version of this game is approximately an equivalent bet to playing a 10-7-5 game where there is no bonus on the deal! 

Figure 6

      For practice, look at Figure 6, which is a Deuces Wild pay schedule. Is this the best schedule, the second best schedule, or the third best schedule? To figure it out, you need to look in the first column of the lower half of the chart. Figure 5 showed that the best pay table for this game is 15-9-4-4-3. If you look, you should be able to find these numbers, as this is indeed the best pay schedule. Pay schedules are not hard to read once you get used to it, but many players simply do not bother. That is an extremely expensive mistake.

      In the upper part of this same chart, you’ll see that the “deal” part of the Deuces Wild game returns money for both “Two Pair” and “Queens or Better.” It is unusual for a Deuces Wild game to return money for these items. But that’s how they chose to reward us to keep the return in the 99% range. They could have returned more for straights, flushes, full houses, etc., and not returned money for two pair or for high pairs, but this gives them the return they want and the game is not so streaky. Figure 7 shows us a Deuces Wild game after the deal in the Ten Play version. Figure 8 shows a Triple Double Bonus game after the deal in the Triple Play version.

Figure 7		Figure 8

      To do background on this game in order to write this article, I played about an hour of Double Pay Deuces Wild, and then had Shirley play for an hour as I watched her. I treat each game as a mathematical puzzle to solve, and Shirley tends to look at “is this game fun to play?” The different ways we look at the game gives us different insights.

      We played at the Fiesta Henderson (the new name for the Reserve) because that is close to where we live and they have good pay schedules. The casino has the best pay schedules for nickel Five Play, and the second best for nickel Triple Play. Triple Double Bonus returned the best of the games, but we don’t know that game cold. We could have played either Double Bonus or Deuces Wild. Double Bonus returned slightly more, but Deuces Wild is more fun.

      It turns out we each ran into the same two problems when we played. They each were something that was “fixed” by experience, but let me warn you about them so maybe you won’t get snared. Inattentive players may well feel the bite of these things more than once apiece. Hopefully not you.

      Shirley and I each have played a lot of Triple Play and Five Play. If we look away from the screen while playing these games, we can instantly find our place again because we know the game so well. If card faces are showing on all of the hands, the game is over. If only card faces are only showing on the bottom line (and card backs on the other lines), the game is not over yet and the hand still needs to be played. It is different in Double Pay.

      In Double Pay, card faces appear on all of the cards, whether it is after the deal or after the draw. The way to tell if you still need to make a decision or not is by the color of the pay schedules around the edge. If the pay schedule boxes are red and yellow as they are in Figure 1, then you need to play the hand. If they are blue and yellow as they are in Figure 3, then the hand is over.

      This mistake happened once for each of us. We got distracted by something and when we returned, we saw the machine with the red and yellow pay schedule boxes. We were not tuned into the distinction between “red and yellow” and “blue and yellow,” but we thought we knew what it meant when we saw all of the card faces, so we went ahead and hit the “deal” button without selecting cards. We were so used to playing regular Five Play that we assumed that the hand was over and it was time for a new deal. Be careful. It can be expensive to make that mistake.

      The other mistake we both made was to not wait for the machine. In regular Five Play, as soon as you see the cards in the bottom hand, it is time for you to make your play. In Double Pay Five Play, there are still four hands to uncover after you see the bottom hand. If they are “nothing special,” the cards uncover fast enough and you can play quickly.

      But occasionally you will get a straight flush or higher on one of the non-base hands. The credits start to accumulate instantly, but it can take a few seconds for them to add up. Not a big deal, except that the buttons for playing the hand are locked until all of the “deal” credits have accumulated. If you are playing fast, it is easy to start pressing buttons before the machine is ready. If you then hit the “draw” button before re-pressing these same buttons, then you have held the incorrect card. This can also be an expensive mistake.

      When you are playing regular Five Play, a dealt royal flush is as good as it gets, because that translates into royals on all hands. In Double Pay Five Play, any dealt royal flush is pretty special, whether on the bottom line or not. Dealt royals pay 60,000 coins. If they are on the bottom line, they pay an additional 20,000 coins as well (4,000 coins times each of the lines). To be sure, receiving 80,000 coins is better than 60,000 coins, but not by a lot.

      Any dealt royal will make you smile. Guaranteed!

      Shirley and I both found this game to be an enjoyable experience. The experience on the deal is very much like a slot machine (i.e. hit the button and take what you get!), but when the game returns 99%, this is a lot better return than you find on slot machines. In regular Five Play video poker, you usually see what is coming. If you are dealt, for example, 5 5 9 9 7, you know you are likely to end up with one full house and the four two-pair hands. Not always, of course, but that’s the most common result.

      But in Double Pay Five Play, half the return comes out of the blue, because you get five dealt hands at once—and each one has the potential to pay you something. You don’t get dealt four aces very often (about every 54,000 hands), but when you do you get paid a ton! And it is always a surprise, because you had no idea it was coming at this particular moment.

This article originally appeared in Strictly Slots Magazine