[mannika]

Think you can only really do this through estimations.

If you assumed that you played every single royal flush possible hand you were dealt (10*4 of them), and saw to the river on each one, the odds against the royal flush (using both of your cards) is 64973:1. This works out to $0.154 per hand assuming a $10k payoff

However, I'd say that if you are attempting to play profitable poker, you'd end up folding maybe 15-20% of those 10 hands preflop, you'd be folding the flop 5% of the time, and other complications (pot not being raked, your raise resulting in no flop, etc.) would probably account for another 5-10% of the value of this.

Given all these decrements, I think a good figure for the value of the high hand jackpot is about (0.154)*(0.825)*(0.925)*(0.95) = $0.11/10000*(total jackpot*70%) per hand.

Next we equate this to the expected cost. If you are playing TAG, about 6-7% of your total hands will be winners (and will be raked). Therefore, you expect to pay (0.50)*(0.065) = 3.25 cents per hand.

Therefore, equating the two equations we get a target jackpot of about $4200. I think that it would be +EV to play these tables if the jackpot is greater than this amount.

Please correct any errors in my math/assumptions.