Insofar as figuring out a “crazy paytable,” I use shorthand. I know the -EV effects of the most common changes to paytables, such as the flush and full house payoffs in JOB or the four of a kind payoff in Deuces, so I can usually cobble together a rough estimate of what an unusual paytable and/or promotion should return. If you know how often a given hand should occur, that helps. So let’s say that tonight only, you get 100 extra coins for getting four sevens. That will happen roughly once in 5,000 hands, and 100 coins is 20 bets, so that’s 20 extra bets for every 5,000 hands, or 0.4%. That would not be enough to justify, for example, playing Airport Deuces or 9/6 DDB. But it would push some games into positive territory.