In order to have an advantage over the house, you must find a machine with a progressive jackpot that is larger than about 1750 maximum bets. ($8750 for $1 machines, $2200 for $.25 machines, $440 for $.05 machines). This level only makes the game even with the house. The jackpot must be higher than this in order to gain an advantage. The player's edge increases by about 1% for each addition of 350 maximum bets into the progressive jackpot.

In order to have a 2% edge, the jackpot must be about 2500 max. bets. ($12,500 for $1 machines, $3125 for $.25 machines, $625 for $.05 machines).

The main difficulty with playing video poker is that it takes an average of 60 hours of rapid play to hit a royal flush, and it takes a _huge_ bankroll to survive long enough to win. During this time, the casino enjoys an advantage of approximately 5%. Straight flushes can be expected about once every 6 hours on average, but these contribute only about 0.5% to the player's return. 4-of-kind hands occur only about once per hour, and these hands account for about 5% of the player's return.

What this all means to the video poker player is that you will be playing with about a 10% disadvantage while waiting for an occasional "boost" from a 4-of-kind or straight flush. On average, it will take a bankroll about as large as the progressive jackpot to survive long enough to hit the royal flush (and this assumes that the jackpot is large enough to give the player a reasonable edge over the house).

The following table shows the relative frequency of each hand, and the resultant effect on the expected return, assuming the given strategy is used. The table shows that you can expect to get nothing back about 55% of the time, and hit either a high pair, two pair, or three of a kind another 41% of the time. Hands of higher value occur only about 3.6% of the time. This means that the house has a whopping 31% edge most of the time.

    return    % rate    frequency    variance
  ------------------------------------------
    5.308 ->  0.00306 -> 1/32680     91.90  --==--
    0.492 ->  0.00984 -> 1/10163      0.246 STRAIGHT FLUSH!!!!
    5.878 ->  0.235   -> 1/425        1.469 FOUR OF A KIND!!!
    9.183 ->  1.148   -> 1/87         0.735 FULL HOUSE!!
    5.584 ->  1.117   -> 1/89.5       0.293 FLUSH!
    4.512 ->  1.128   -> 1/88.7       0.180 STRAIGHT!
   22.227 ->  7.409   -> 1/13.5       0.667 THREE OF A KIND
   25.780 -> 12.890   -> 1/7.76       0.516 TWO PAIR
   21.053 -> 21.053   -> 1/4.75       0.211 HIGH PAIR
  ------------------------------------------
             44.993%                  4.317 + royal

Source:  rec.gambling