Question of the Day - 23 January 2020

The short answer is it doesn't matter, but the details of your play have some bearing.

Are you playing 6/5 Jacks or Better, where the full house pays 6 and the flush pays 5? If so, you're playing with just a 95% return. At 7/5, it's 96.15%. At 8/5, it's 97.3%. Those percentages, of course, all assume that you're playing perfect strategy and almost no one does, so the returns are actually lower.

As for Double Double Bonus, if you're playing 9/6 DDB with a theoretical return of 98.98%, that's better than the short-pay JoB schedules listed. So switching would be "smart" (and you probably should have been playing that from the start). However, you're still playing a negative-expectation game and DDB strategy is more difficult and less intuitive than JoB's. There are lots of variables involved, but playing the game with the highest overall return is usually the prudent move, regardless of how you feel. With this in mind, you should have a copy of Jean Scott's The Frugal Video Poker Scouting Guide handy to make comparisons.

Back to your method, the reality is, switching on a feeling is neither smart nor stupid. If you're playing by the seat of your pants without having done much study, changing games on a whim won't have any appreciable affect on your outcome. If anything, frequently changing games takes time away from play, which is a good thing when you're not the favorite, so change away!

We, too, sometimes have a feeling that we're going to hit a 4-of-a-kind. There's nothing wrong with "wishful thinking," but we don't change games or strategies in response to it.

Here's the link to the poll on your favorite Las Vegas Strip resort-casinos.