The thing is that, in video poker and casino Hold'em, a royal flush pays bigger than (any other) straight flush, so it's usually deemed a separate hand in casinos, and it was also listed as a separate hand at the (now closed) site where I played the first real money poker hand.
I wasn't able to maintain 8 tables of Zoom, kept 6 open, but I started running into buy-in obligations quite soon, though they were usually $1.02-1.08 and only one $1.75.
Sometimes my stack was down to a comfortable depth of 20 bb where I could make Sklansky-Chubukov openshoves with the strongest offsuit hands.
Anyway, I wasn't going to grind for more than 3 hours anyway; it was barely worth my time, I was playing rather in the recreational mood, to try out silly things and see what happens.
Apparently, NL2 isn't aggressive enough for having a balanced limping range (with AQ+, TT+ mixed in) to be profitable. If it were non-Zoom NL100 (like the mentioned jackpot tables), I'd have to defend my straightflush chasing range by adding strong offsuit (limp/reraise) hands to it, but the NL2 Zoom population likely weren't writing notes on me.
I ended up playing over 3K hands in less than 3 hours, losing at 12 EV bb/100 (-$11 overall / -$7 EV), of course not getting the prize, though I had quite a few one-outers on the flop/turn and once a two-outer on the turn, but I kept getting 'simple' straights and flushes and tilting over that like I'd never would in a normal ring game
Surprisingly, all my EV loss was in the ~1500 full ring Zoom hands; in 6-max, I was even slightly +EV.
I think I would have had to play 5K-6K hands on average to get the prize because I had to fold non-premium offsuit hands and so would have folded a lot of would-be one-hole-plus-four-board-card straight flushes.
Last edited by coon74; 12-23-2015 at 01:32 AM.