About Aces Bonus Poker

27 March 2016

By John Grochowski

QUESTION: My dad and took a trip to a casino that had both 8/5 Bonus Poker and 8/5 ACES Bonus Poker, so naturally I played the ACES version. I noticed that there were as many people playing BP as ACES. Why? Is there a reason to avoid the ACES?

ANSWER: No, there is nothing in ACES Bonus Poker that would make it a bet to avoid. What you were observing were people who either didn’t know there was a potential extra payoff on ACES, didn’t care, or just felt luckier on the Bonus Poker machines.

For those unfamiliar with ACES, each ace is marked with a letter – A, C, E or S. If you get four aces in order so they spell ACES with no gaps, they pay 800-for-1. With a five-coin wager, that’s a 4,000-coin bonanza, the same as you’d get for a royal flush, instead of the usual 400 coins you get for four aces on Bonus Poker.

Starting from the left, the aces have to be in positions 1-2-3-4 or 2-3-4-5. The non-ace card in your final hand can’t be in the middle. I once had a hand of A-C-9 of diamonds-E-S. The aces were in the proper order, but with that 9 in the middle breaking up the spelling, my return was 400 coins, not 4,000.

It doesn’t happen often enough to add much more to the payback percentage. With an 8/5 pay table, Bonus Poker returns 99.2% with expert play, while the ACES version returns 99.4%.

Still, that’s a little extra return with no extra risk. It would seem reasonable for the ACES machines to draw more players than the Bonus Poker machines.

That they don’t is part of a long-standing part of video poker. There are many players who don’t know the differences between pay tables.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when I was first becoming aware of such things, the Tropicana in Las Vegas had a long bank of Jacks or Better machines. The games alternated pay tables, so that a 9/6 machine was next to an 8/5 that was next to another 9/6 that was next to another 8/5, and so on.

Players seemed to be choosing games indiscriminately. There were as many players at 8/5 games as at 9/6 machines.

I finally broke down and asked a player next to me why he chose that machine when the one on the other side had a higher pay table. He said, “I was on that one this morning. Didn’t win a thing.”

A large segment of players will play where they feel lucky, and may not even notice that another pay table gives them a better shot to win.


QUESTION: At the craps table, another guy asked, “Do you charge commission on all buys, or just the winners?” I don’t know about commissions. What was he talking about?

ANSWER: When you buy one of the box numbers instead of placing it, you pay the house a commission of 5% of your bet. In exchange, winners are paid at true odds – a winner 4 is paid at 2-1 instead of the 9-5 it would bring on a place bet.

Most casinos charge the commission on all buy bets. That leaves the house with a 4.67% house edge when you buy 4 or 10, an improvement on the 6.67% edge on place bets on 4 or 10.

Some casinos charge the commission only on winning bets. That drops the house edge when you buy 4 or 10 to 1.67%. It’s worth asking.