There’s no disputing that Double Double Bonus Video Poker is the most popular of all the mainstream video poker games. As such, you should have no trouble finding this game, or its predecessor Double Bonus Video Poker, at any land-based or online casino. The “Full-Pay” paytable for this game has an RTP of 98.98%, making it one of the best bets you can find at a casino. The maximum win is €4000 if you are playing dollar denominations, but you can increase the maximum cash win significantly by playing each hand at a higher denomination.
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Double Double Bonus Video Poker Free Play
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Introduction To Double Double Bonus Video Poker
Different players have different preferences as to who creates the best online video poker machines – this is to be expected, after all, the world would be a very boring place if we all preferred the exact same things. I cannot help but crack a little smile, however, when I see that revenue figures indicate that I am not alone in believing that Microgaming’s implementations of Video Poker are by far the best around.
Microgaming’s ultra-high quality implementations of Video Poker are not yet available everywhere, however; particularly if you live in the United States. Whilst online sports betting is quickly being legalized across the USA, online casino gaming is still lagging far, far, behind. If you don’t want to go offshore – an understandable proposition, given the low quality of international casinos that accept American gamblers – all is not lost.
Real Time Gaming (RTG) has the best selection of Video Poker games you will find anywhere. The presentation might not (yet!) be up to the standards of Microgaming’s creations, but in terms of variety, RTG offers the widest variety of Video Pokers available anywhere.
More than 50 variants are included in both single and multi-hand formats, including the elusive Triple Double Bonus Poker. Their games are not modelled on the legendary Game King hardware in the same way that Microgaming’s are, but they still provide a fun, fair, and perfectly acceptable game of Video Poker.
Oh, and you don’t HAVE to be in the United States to enjoy Real Time Gaming’s Video Poker games either – make sure you find a reputable casino before depositing, as there are still a few shady operators running this software. A license from the Kahnawake Gaming Commission is usually a good sign, as they have really tightened up their act over the last few years, and are now viewed as a respectable licensing authority.
The Problem With The Original Jacks Or Better
Royal Flushes are extremely hard to hit – even the Poker pros you might see on TV will often comment that “that was only my second ever royal” or something like that when such hands come along. And this was the flaw in the design of the original Jacks or Better version of Video Poker.
You can play Jacks or Better every day for months – perhaps even a full year – and STILL fail to hit just one of the two hands which pay anything exciting – the Straight Flush and the Royal Flush. Why? – the odds of being dealt a natural Royal Flush are 1 in 649,740.
If we go a little deeper and consider the re-draw, this second chance dramatically lowers your odds – provided you play the correct strategy – all the way down to 1 in 40,488. We’ll be talking strategy soon, and will even provide you with a strategy card to use next time you play online (it’s perfectly legal to take it into a land-based casino too!) while you are still new to the game.
Here is another major issue with Jacks or Better Video Poker – your odds of hitting a Straight Flush are only marginally better than your odds of hitting a Royal. Despite this, the payout is laughably small. It hurts the most when you have 9-10-J-Q-K … take it from me, I haven’t touched Jacks or Better since that exact scenario happened to me back in 2018.
This is all old hat, however – the problems with Jacks or Better were spotted almost immediately by Si Redd’s competitors the moment his game hit casino floors, and other gaming companies quickly began to develop their own Draw Poker variants. The game was already raking in incredible sums of money – imagine how much more it could make with some f the problems rectified and a more player-friendly paytable?!
Super Double Bonus Video Poker
For a while, there was seemingly a new video poker game being released every week for a while. Developers kept coming up with ways to one-up each other, adding endless superlatives to their games. Believe it or not, though, there is in fact a logical reason for the name “Double Double Bonus Poker”. The game is named as such because the payoffs for specific four-of-a-kind combinations are doubled when compared to the same combinations in regular Double Bonus Poker, provided the right kicker is present.
Eventually, things settled down, the public spoke with their wallets, and the most popular variations stayed on the casino floors, whilst the remainder were handed back to the developer along with a message to say “sorry pal, your machine sucks!”.
…well, perhaps not EXACTLY like that. But who knows, men do enjoy using brutal honesty if they feel they can get away with it! I’m not sure how many clients would appreciate such … direct feedback today, however!
Double Double Bonus Video Poker: King Of The Hill
The best games – titles such as Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild, Double Bonus Poker, All Aces and Double Double Bonus Poker did not take long to become established. It has been many years now, and if an online casino offers video poker, you can feel reasonably sure that these five titles will be there… surrounded by old favourites with small but dedicated userbases and new titles that are hoping to break through into the mainstream.
But why WAS Double Double Bonus Video Poker such a popular game? A quick look at the paytables gives you a few clues immediately:
Jacks Or Better
Let’s be honest here – it is extremely difficult to hit anything exciting whatsoever with a paytable like this. A four of a kind isn’t a BAD hit… but 25x your stake is hardly life-changing either. You are essentially playing for the Royal Flush and nothing else.
Keep in mind that as we were just discussing, your chances of being dealt a Royal Flush straight off the bat are 649,740 to 1. Your odds of hitting a Royal Flush after drawing are 40,488 to 1. That means you’ll have to play a MINIMUM of 111 hands 365 days a year just to match the odds – which is no guarantee of success.
Both games feature a 4,000 coin jackpot and bearing in mind that they both use the same game mechanics and 52 card deck, your odds of hitting it is identical in both games. My math may have been a little off – finding a trustworthy internet converter for probabilities and other tricky mathematical concepts isn’t as easy as you might think! However, 1 in 40,000 seems close enough to me.
Add in the 1 in 9,090 chances of hitting a straight flush and Jacks or Better players can expect to see something good once every 50,000 hands or so if they are lucky.
Now take a look at the secondary table I produced for Double Double Bonus Poker – as well as the two aforementioned combinations sitting right at the top, you have 1 in 16,129 for the best four of a kind combination – yes, it pays half of what a royal flush does but it is 2.5 times more likely to occur.
The next two four-of-a-kind combinations occur even more frequently at 1 in 6,993 and 1 in 5,780. Sure, these are long odds, but it still means they occur far, far more frequently than a royal flush, making for a much more exciting game.
Add up all of the “big win” combinations in Double Double Bonus Poker and you’ve got a 1 in 81,209 shot at hitting something exciting during your session – and you can multiply this much further by playing a multi-play machine (See our full guide to Video Poker for more information on multi-play machines).
Things To Know Before You Play Double Double Bonus Video Poker
If you’ve ever played poker before, whether it be Texas Hold’em, 7 Card Stud, or any other variety, you’ll have a massive leg-up when it comes to getting started playing video poker. This is because the hand rankings are largely the same a lot of the time. If you are unfamiliar with the traditional poker hand rankings, please see our main Video Poker article. And remember, you can play Double Double Bonus Video Poker Free at the top of this page.
The Five Coin Relic
A strange oddity of Video Poker Double Double Bonus and almost every other type of Video Poker machine both online and offline is the way that you always need to be betting five coins if you want to be sure of receiving the full payoff for a Royal Flush.
This problem is less of an issue in Double Double Bonus because of all the other combinations which will pay you fairly no matter how many coins you choose to play.
Nevertheless, if you are going for Royal Flushes then the best thing to do is set the coin size to the minimum, set the game to five-coin mode, and then increase your bet from there until you are happy with the final bet per hand.
The Flipside
Most online Double Double Bonus Video Poker games will allow you to set coin denominations as low as one penny – I can’t imagine too many players will be interested in playing at €0.05 per hand! Setting the denomination to quarters gives a per-hand bet of €1.25, which is perfect for me but maybe a little high if you are completely new to the game.
But SHOULD you play all five coins when playing Double Double Bonus? A growing number of “professional” players (If somebody knows the secret to become a professional who makes a living playing a negative expectation game, please hit me up) are saying no; all of the other, much more common wins do not care how many coins you play, and you are much more likely to see a couple of those than those once a year(if you’re lucky) Royal Flushes. You do lose a small amount of RTP by opting out of playing five coins, but it is a tiny 0.2% difference directly related to the potential lower payout you would receive if you were to hit a Royal Flush.
Double Double Bonus Video Poker Strategy
We mentioned above that the RTP for 9/6 Double Double Bonus is 98.98%, however, this relies on you as the player making the absolute perfect move 100% of the time without fail. Similarly to Blackjack, there may be cases that are extremely borderline and thus can appear counterintuitive, leading you to make the wrong decision.
A simple way around this is to create and print out your own Double Double Bonus Video Poker Strategy Card. You could laminate this if you wish, but it is much easier to simply fold it up and place it in your jacket pocket at the beginning of your trip. In fact, why not print off a few, just in case one gets damaged, lost, or stolen?
It is not illegal to carry a simple strategy card with you inside the casino, and whilst the following strategy is slightly simplified – it will only get you up to 98.9792% as opposed to the theoretical maximum of 98.9808% – the difference is so small that in my eyes it’s worth skipping the additional fifty or so steps required to get yourself those 16 thousands of a per cent worth of additional RTP!
How To Use The Double Double Bonus Strategy Card
Some hands in Video Poker leave little room for interpretation – for example, if you are dealt a PAT Royal Flush, the machine should hold all five cards for you, and all you have to do is hit draw to collect your Jackpot.
Over situations are not so clear cut, and the auto-hold on the machine will usually choose to hold cards that APPEAR to be the obviously correct choice when in many situations, they are not.
Simple start from the top of this list and hold the cards that match with the first result which most accurately defines your pre-draw holdings. Here’s the card:
Note that the card is much easier to read in a horizontal aspect ratio, so be sure to download and print out our casino version here.
Double Double Bonus Video Poker Final Thoughts
Double Double Bonus Video Poker deserves its place as the king of video poker machines – no other variant can match the excitement, payout potential, and overall simple fun of spending a few hours chilling on our sofa with your favourite laptop, tablet, or smaRTPhone, and playing a bunch of hands of the best Video Poker game ever devised. We love it.
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