Double Double Bonus Poker

Double Double Bonus Poker: The Fifth Card You Were About to Discard

This variant asks you to care about a card that in nearly every other video poker game is irrelevant. Certain four of a kind hands pay extra when combined with a specific fifth card, so the kicker sitting alongside your quad can be worth more than the quad itself is on a plainer machine.

That is a genuine quirk of the Double Double Bonus family and it produces a habit worth building. It is worth pausing before automatically discarding a lone card sitting alongside three or four of a kind, because checking whether it matches one of the game's bonus kicker combinations can be the difference between a good payout and a substantially better one.

The reason this catches players out is that discarding the odd card is normally automatic. With three of a kind held, the fifth card has no bearing on anything and gets thrown without thought. Here that reflex can cost you the game's richest payouts.

The underlying game is otherwise conventional. No wild cards, hand rankings following the standard ladder from a pair of jacks or better to a royal flush, and each hand drawing fresh cards from its own shuffled fifty-two card deck.

Multi-hand play scales from a single hand up to three, ten, fifty-two or as many as a hundred at once. In that format the kicker consideration becomes more interesting still, since a hold decision applies across every hand while the drawn cards differ, so a kicker held speculatively may pay off in some hands and not others.

After any winning hand the Double or Nothing round offers a straightforward choice: bank the win or risk it on a single card draw against the dealer for a chance to double it. As always with even-money gambles, it neither improves nor damages the underlying game, it simply increases the spread of outcomes.

The listed top prize is up to four thousand credits from a single hand.

Double Double Bonus Poker suits players who enjoy a game with a genuine detail to master and who will build the habit of checking the kicker before discarding. It is a poor fit for anyone who plays quickly on autopilot, since the entire value of the variant sits in a decision that is easy to make without thinking and expensive to get wrong.