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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. 

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. 

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!

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:

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.

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.

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.

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!

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:

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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