Neither straight flushes nor four of a kinds are exactly common in video poker. But the foursomes come up more than 20 times as often as the straight flushes, and in games such as Double Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus Poker, Super Aces and more, all quads at least equal the straight flush payoff of 250 coins for a five-coin bet.
Why does the more obtainable hand pay more? Because the goal of game designers is to make a fun game that people will want to come back and play, even if it doesn’t reflect the true odds of the game. People like the attainable bonus payoff on four Aces, which is 800 coins on Double Bonus, and reaches 2,000 if the fifth card is a 2, 3 or 4 on Double Double Bonus.
In Jacks or Better, where quads pay only 125 coins, the only really big jackpot is the 4,000-coin bonanza for a five-coin bet on royal flushes, which come up only about once per 40,391 hands. Game designers saw a need for a large secondary jackpot that would leave players feeling happy when they left the game.
Should that jackpot be on the next rarest hand? In Jacks or Better, straight flushes come up about once per 9,148 hands. For an average customer playing about 500 hands an hour, that’s more than 18 hours between straight flushes. Those hands just don’t occur often enough to provide much positive reinforcement.
Instead, game designers turned to four-Ace hands, and also ramped up the paybacks on other fours of a kind. All told, quads come up once in a little more than 400 hands — better than once an hour. Those are the kinds of odds that keep players coming back.
