Video Poker Strategy

I received an email from a video poker player who asked me this question:

“I can never win at video poker. Are the video poker machines rigged?”

(Note: I’m not telling this story just to brag about my good fortune but rather to use it as a teaching example for video poker players.)

In a previous article, I bemoaned my long royal flush drought in which I played about 270,000 hands between one royal flush and the next one.  Then boom … I found myself in another mini-drought beginning in July 2019, lasting until the middle of December 2019. I was hoping for one more royal before the year ended. Here’s what happened.

The playing strategy for most of the hands you’ll receive when you play the popular Jacks or Better video poker game is a no-brainer because it’s fairly obvious which cards you should hold and which ones you should discard. But then there are the not so obvious hands in which you must choose between two (or more) possible plays. For example, how would you play a hand in Jacks or Better that contains

Joker’s Wild is a fun variation on video poker, one that has carved out its own niche of loyal players. Like all video poker games, Joker’s Wild comes in a variety of pay tables and payback percentages. 

Unlike the rest, it comes with a basic divide: Some games start the pay table at two pairs, and others start it at a pair of Kings.

And beyond that, there’s an intriguing variation. One version of Joker’s Wild Kings or Better puts the top payback on five of a kind instead of a royal flush. 

Let’s face it. What all video poker players hope (and pray) for is that the next hand will give them a royal flush because that results in an immediate 4,000 coin payoff. But did you ever wonder what the chance that this will happen when you hold, say, four cards to a royal flush?  How about holding three cards to a royal?  And what is the chance of being dealt a royal flush on the initial deal? I’ve summarized the answers to these questions below and they may surprise you.

Every video poker game has its strategy quirks dictated by their pay table. How to play video poker and get the most out of the game is different when you’re playing Jacks or Better, with a 2-for-1 payoff on two pairs, compared to Double Bonus Poker, with bigger pays on four of a kind but only 1-for-1 on two pairs.

Multi-Strike Poker has been with us since the early 2000s – multiple lifetimes as electronic casino games go. That it’s held onto a niche in casinos and is also available on online casino after all this time speaks to the quality the concept. 

It’s an intriguing game that can create some huge wins, but getting the most out of Multi-Strike requires some changes from normal video poker strategy.

Standard video poker machines are called single-play because the player plays only one game at a time. However, single-play games are not the only type of video poker game available in a casino (or online). There are also games that play three, five, 10, 50 and even 100 hands at a time. 

These multiple hand games are called multiple-hand or multiple-play (or multi-hand / multi-play for short). There is nothing magical about how to play video poker multiple hand games.