Video poker is one of the more popular casino games at both real and virtual casinos. It has several advantages over other casino games: it is relatively inexpensive to play, the payouts can be very high in progressive video poker, it is very straight forward to play, it is a strategic game and by adopting the optimum strategy the hopuse edge can be reduced to around about one percentage point.
Effectively video poker is a slot game with a difference. Just as in a conventional slot a player bets with a token or virtual coin, then presses or clicks a button. Inside the machine this triggers a random number generator which effectively shuffles and deals a virtual card deck of 52 cards. The player sees the cards that have been dealt and can choose to discard some or all of them and have them replaced with different cards from the same virtual deck.
The resultant hand is ranked just as hands are ranked in regular poker games. If the ranking is at least as high as the minimum poker hand quoted in the game pay table then the player wins the amount stated; the higher the hand ranking the higher the payout.
There are a number of video poker variants and one of the very popular ones is Jacks or Better. In this game the lowest ranked winning hand is a pair of jacks. One variant of this is called Full Pay Jacks or Better and it has a payout of 99.5% given that optimal strategy is used.
A game with an even better payout is Deuces Wild. In this game deuces can count as any card and it is claimed by some that it is possible to find games where there theoretical return with perfect strategy is over 100%, though we are yet to locate one. If we had we would probably be playing it now rather than writing this article
Some video poker games diverge even more than this from real poker. For instance some games include jokers, which are wild cards and can be used to create silly hands such as five of a kind.


26. October 2011
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