It is negligible. I am an experienced player, and I can't see how the limited value of this in a real game compensates for the incredible downside of being caught cheating.
Making money at (cash game, not tournament) poker doesn't have much to do with your cards. To make money you have to convince another player with a second-best hand to put money in the pot. In that sense it's all about the other players' cards.
And in order to get a "huge payoff" your opponents must hold cards that justify calling a huge bet. But almost none of the second-best hands in these decks are anywhere near strong enough to justify committing any significant amount of money to the pot.
Things get more interesting if in fact a deck can be found that gives multiple players "big" hands. But that is a lot harder, and kind of subjective. For instance, would you call a pot-sized raise on the river holding the 10 of spades with four lower spades on the board? I know I wouldn't, even though a flush is a "big" hand.
I guess ultimately it comes down to the fact that poker is a mostly situational game. And one that is played out over the course of many hands. Knowing that you will definitely win one hand during a session where you may see 200 hands doesn't really do you much good.
That said, it is a cool party trick.
P.S. In a game with experienced players, acting meekly all the way and then betting strongly at the end is a sure-fire way to get all but the top 5 or so possible hands to fold.
It is definitely not negligible. Slow playing is a valid strategy even against great players. If all but the top 5 hands or so fold every time you slow play, you're not playing against good players (experienced != good when it comes to poker) and you should just start slow playing and stealing every pot. Then when they figure it out, don't do it again until you get a monster. Most of abusing amateurs is simply doing this, exploiting a weakness until they realize it, then doing the opposite. By the time it stops working you're ready to go.
Regardless, presumably you'd have to memorize this order of the deck in order to stack it that way, thus you could look at your hand and determine the opponent's hand and what the board would be. You could play accordingly. It's easy to make a lot of money at poker when you know what all the cards are.
On the other hand, I've never seen a game for significant stakes where the players were dealt, and I've sure never known anyone good enough to take a deck and sort it into a specific 52 card pattern without being noticed.
We can debate this all day probably, but slow-playing is not a valid strategy if you actually want to make money. By not betting in early rounds you are giving up a lot of value in the hand. And more importantly you are not setting the appropriate price for other players to continue in the hand. Very few hands that are best on the flop are unbeatable on the river. Unless you can put your opponent on a very tight range of hands, it's not a good idea to slow-play, and I rarely do it. I've had much better success just betting for value.
Yes you are correct that strategy depends on context. My contention is that even when you think the context is appropriate for slow-playing, you are probably wrong.
Doing this every 200 hands would add a minimum of 0.75 big blinds per 100 hands to your winrate - more realistically it would be well over 1 big blind. That is very significant in a tough game.
Making money at (cash game, not tournament) poker doesn't have much to do with your cards. To make money you have to convince another player with a second-best hand to put money in the pot. In that sense it's all about the other players' cards.
And in order to get a "huge payoff" your opponents must hold cards that justify calling a huge bet. But almost none of the second-best hands in these decks are anywhere near strong enough to justify committing any significant amount of money to the pot.
Things get more interesting if in fact a deck can be found that gives multiple players "big" hands. But that is a lot harder, and kind of subjective. For instance, would you call a pot-sized raise on the river holding the 10 of spades with four lower spades on the board? I know I wouldn't, even though a flush is a "big" hand.
I guess ultimately it comes down to the fact that poker is a mostly situational game. And one that is played out over the course of many hands. Knowing that you will definitely win one hand during a session where you may see 200 hands doesn't really do you much good.
That said, it is a cool party trick.
P.S. In a game with experienced players, acting meekly all the way and then betting strongly at the end is a sure-fire way to get all but the top 5 or so possible hands to fold.