Duel Video Poker: Skill Is Not Optional Here

Video poker is the one game in this lobby where your decisions do the heavy lifting, and the arithmetic behind them is small enough to carry around. After the deal you have seen five cards, which leaves forty seven unseen. Hold four to a flush and nine of those forty seven finish it, a shade over nineteen per cent on a single draw. Hold an open ended straight and eight cards finish it, about seventeen per cent. Hold four to an inside straight and it drops to four cards, under nine per cent, which is why that particular draw is the most common way to leak money at the machine.

Those three numbers settle most of the awkward hands on their own. The genuinely hard ones are where a made hand and a bigger draw sit in the same five cards. The rule there is duller than anybody wants: keep the small paying hand you already hold. It is usually worth more than the enormous one you might build. The exception is a royal draw, where the prize at the end is big enough to flip the maths.

The royal is also where the game gets its reputation for cruelty. It is the hand that pays for the entire paytable and it arrives on the order of once in tens of thousands of hands played properly, so a full session, a full month, a full year can pass without one. Anyone claiming this game runs cold is describing a distribution with a very rare, very large payout, working exactly as designed.

What all this means at a table with no edge is that the return is genuinely there to be taken, and it is the only game here that hands you a way to leave money behind through nothing but haste. Every other original settles itself the moment you press the button. This one waits for you to choose, five cards at a time, and it never tells you afterwards which choice was the wrong one.

The pace is the quiet danger, and it is the opposite of the danger on the fast games. Nothing moves until you act, so a session can run for hours without ever feeling like it has been going for hours, and the hand count climbs past anything you would have agreed to in advance. A thousand hands is an unremarkable evening at this game, and a thousand hands played at speed while half watching something else is where the discipline goes, one held card at a time.

None of that is a reason to avoid it. It is the reason to play it at the table rather than in the background, because this is the rare game that pays attention back.

Duel Video Poker RTP rests on one thing: the 9/6 paytable

Video poker machines look identical and pay differently, and Duel picked the good one. The two numbers that matter are what the full house and the flush return. Nine and six is the full fat version; casinos routinely run eight and five, or worse, and pocket the difference.

On the 9/6 paytable with perfect hold and discard decisions the game returns 99.54 per cent. The rolling promotion covers the rest to reach 100. A royal flush on maximum coins pays 800 for 1.

Strategy is not optional here

Like Blackjack, this is a game where your decisions carry the return. Hold the wrong card and you have paid for it yourself. There is a correct discard for every hand, it is published, and the 100 per cent figure assumes you follow it every time.

Everything else in the lineup pays the same whatever you do. These two do not.

Two games here ask something of you

This and the blackjack table are the two skill games in a lineup of chance games. If you want the same maths without homework, Plinko or Dice return the same to everyone.