A:
We put this question to Bob Dancer and here's his response.
There is no master list anywhere and a high percentage of players who might be in the running for the lead have no idea of exactly how many they’ve hit. And of the hundreds of players I know, I don’t know the “royal score” of any of them.
My personal best guess is that I’ve hit between 1,500 and 2,000 royal flushes. If it’s not in that range, it’s more likely to be higher than those numbers than lower.
With the invention of Triple Play and its family of games, royals come faster. My personal record includes dealt royals on 25¢ Fifty Play ($50K) and 10¢ Hundred Play ($40K). Those two jackpots alone count for 150 royal flushes lickety-split. Even without dealt royals, playing a Hundred Play averages one royal every hour or so. If you play those machines a lot, your royals add up fast.
There's relatively little skill in hitting a royal flush, though I'll talk about some skill factors at the end of this answer.
The biggest factors in hitting a lot of royals are how many hours you’ve been playing the game and what percentage of those hours are on multi-line machines. I’ve been averaging about 30 hours a week of playing time since 1994. That’s a long career, but I know players who’ve been playing longer. There were years when I played more on Five Play and Ten Play machines than single line. And other times where I had many many hours playing Fifty Play and Hundred Play.
Good players, of course, have better results over time and tend to stay in the game longer. Bad players, on average, tend to have shorter careers, either because they run out of money or get tired of losing. Players who have the skills to win tend to like the game better than those who don’t, simply because winning is fun and losing sucks.
Finally, some bad players hit royals more frequently than good players. Every game has its examples, but in 9/6 Jacks or Better consider:
A♥ K♥ T♥ 5♥ J♣. Competent players hold AKT5, and if they do that, they can't get a royal on this hand. Non-expert players hold AKT and if they do that, there’s a 1,080-to-1 chance they’ll hit a royal this time.
A♦ K♦ Q♠ J♠ 9♥. Bad players go for the royal rather than holding AKQJ. (If they do, going for the spades is a smarter play than going for the diamonds).
The two plays above are tougher than average. But even in a beginner play like Q♣ J♦ T♦ 6♠ 2♥, a number of players incorrectly hold JT rather than QJ. They’ll get more royals than the rest of us will, but they’ll also lose a lot more money along the way.
Or how about from K♠ Q♠ J♠ 5♥ J♣? In Jacks or Better, it’s correct to hold the pair, but there are many games where it’s correct to go for the royal. A large number of players play most games more or less the same and play this hand incorrectly in several of them.
So you can see that just getting a lot of royals doesn’t imply you're a good player. It does imply you’ve played a lot.
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