If you are a slot player interested in branching out to other casino games but find table games too intimidating, then video poker is for you! The game is played solo – just you versus the machine, exactly the same way as with playing slots. That is where the similarities end however. If you are familiar with traditional 5-Card Draw poker and standard poker hand rankings, then you will easily understand how a hand of video poker works.
After inserting cash into the machine, you have to choose how many credits you wish to bet. Hit the “Bet One” button to increment your wager by 1 credit, or hit “Bet Max” to bet 5 credits. Hit the “Deal/Draw” button to start the game, unless you had bet max, in which the cards will automatically be dealt to you. Here you will have a decision to make. Decide which cards you will like to keep. Press the buttons that correspond to each card or use the touchscreen to mark the cards that you wish to hold. The word “HOLD” or “HELD” will appear above the cards. You don’t have to hold any if you don’t want to or you can hold all 5 of them. Once you are satisfied, press the “Deal/Draw” button. Cards that you did not hold will be replaced with new ones. The machine will then compare your final hand to the pay table. If there is a match, the hand you matched will flash on the pay table and in most machines, it will display what the winning hand is above the cards. The win meter will show how many credits you won and your credit/cash balance will increment by that amount. The machine is now ready for you to initiate another game.
All video poker games use a single standard 52-card deck. The basic video poker game that all other variants are based on is called “Jacks or Better.” As the title says, you will win any hand that consists of at least a pair of jacks. Any game that has the word “Bonus” in the title will usually have enhanced payoffs for certain 4 Of A Kind hands at the expense of other, more common hands such as two pair. Deuces Wild turns the deuces into wild cards. This results in a pay table where the minimum winning hand is 3 Of A Kind as well as a mini jackpot for a hand of 4 deuces. Joker Poker is a variant that adds a single wild joker to the deck, making it a 53-card deck.
In addition to the simple single-hand games, there are multi-hand variants as well as fancier games that feature bonus rounds or multipliers, adding to the excitement of getting a big hand.
STRATEGY
Alright, let’s move on to strategy. Unlike slots which are entirely dependent on chance with very few exceptions, video poker is a skill-based game. When deciding which cards to hold and discard, there is always 1 best way to play each combination of 5 cards. That is determined by both the probability of obtaining each of the hands on the pay table and what each hand pays if you hit them. You should always strive to make the most optimal hold in order to reduce the casino’s advantage over you as much as possible.
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
⦁ Say you are dealt 7s 4c Qd 8h Jd – the best choice is to hold the QJ. You have opportunities to pair your queen or jack, not to mention that you have two cards needed for a royal flush.
⦁ Alternatively, say you have 9h 9c 3c 5c Kc – do you hold the pair of 9s or go for the flush? The best play is to hold the 4 clubs and go for the flush.
Another thing you can do is scout the casinos to find the best pay tables in your area. With slot machines, we cannot identify the payback percentage of each game just by looking at it. However we can estimate a range to be anywhere between 83% and 98%, with the national average for slots hovering at around 90%. With video poker, you CAN calculate the payback percentage of a game just by observing its pay table. Since casinos cannot legally alter the contents of a deck of cards (even a virtual one), the only way the payback percentage can be adjusted is by changing how much certain hands pay.
For example:
⦁ 9/6 Jacks or Better, which pays 9 credits for 1 on a full house and 6 for 1 on a flush, has a payback percentage of 99.54%
⦁ 8/5 Jacks or Better, which reduces the payoff to 8 and 5 respectively, has a payback percentage of 97.3%
Payback percentages for video poker range anywhere from about 94% to over 100%. Not only does that mean you will lose less money in the long term playing video poker compared to slots, but there are a few pay tables out there that give the skilled player a slight edge over the casino. As of the making of this video, the best video poker game available is full-pay Joker Poker. There is only 1 machine in existence and it is located at the Plaza in Downtown Las Vegas. It has a payback percentage of 100.65% with optimal strategy.
Now these percentages assume that you are betting enough credits to trigger the enhanced payoff for a royal flush. Let me explain. Taking a look at the royal flush payoff, it is 250 credits on a 1-credit bet and it goes up proportionally with each additional credit wagered… until you get to 5 credits. Instead of a 1250 credit payoff, it jumps up to 4000 credits. This means that in the vast majority of video poker games, you should always bet 5 credits if you have any intention of maximizing your long-term payback percentage.
There is a lot more that can be said, but I do not want this video to be too long, so I will finish off by suggesting which games should you learn first and how to start practicing your game. I recommend starting with Jacks or Better. The strategy is easy to learn and the volatility is low. It is the starting point for branching out into other games. Be sure to check out my video on websites and apps that you can use to help practice your game. In that video, I suggest both free and paid options that you can choose to use.
Thank you for reading this lesson on video poker! If you have any questions, please refer to my YouTube playlist or you can ask me in the comment section on any of my videos. Best of luck on your next casino trip!
Go make it happen!