Video poker is a casino game that has much in
common with slot machines, but it is a slot
machine game combined with the rules of five
card draw poker in a very specific manner. Video
poker is often considered by many experienced
gamblers to be vastly superior to slot machines
because of the effect that skilled play has on
the potential payback of the machine. While slot
machines are programmed to pay back a certain
percentage of the money that is fed into the
machine, video poker pays back a percentage that
can be affected by perfect strategic play.
Video poker games first appeared in the
1970's, but didn't start enjoying widespread
popularity until the 1980's, when slot machine
manufacturer IGT became involved in the
production of video poker games. Many people in
casinos who are nervous or intimidated by table
games find video poker to be a lot more
"friendly" than blackjack or live poker. This is
probably because video poker combines the
strategic thinking of a table game like
blackjack with the solitary playing experience
of a slot machine.
Video poker games are easily played. The
player wages 1 or more coins in order to get
dealt five virtual cards on a computer screen.
(A smart player always plays the max bet,
usually 5 coins, since the max bet triggers the
bigger payoffs on the higher ranked hands.) The
player chooses which cards to hold and then
draws cards to replace his discarded cards. The
final hand pays out based on the payout table
for the particular video game.
Popular video poker games include deuces wild
and
jacks or better, both of which are often
played either as single hands or in a multi-hand
version, where the player gets to play 3, 5, 10,
50 or even 100 hands of video poker at the same
time.
Depending on the payout schedule for the
different poker hands on a certain machine, the
payback percentage on a video poker can be very
good indeed. Jacks or better with a "full pay",
or the highest standard payback schedule, pays
back at 99.5% with perfect play. A full pay
deuces wild machine pays back at 100.7% with
perfect play. In actual practice, players who
don't play perfectly and make mistakes reduce
the practical payback percentage on those
machines by 6% or more, making video poker one
of the most profitable games in the casino,
especially since many video poker players play
upwards of 500 hands per hour.
Learning how to play video poker with perfect
strategy is not terribly hard to do. There are
numerous video poker strategy guides available
for sale, and Bob Dancer's excellent tutorials
and software teach video poker strategy through
a series of both charts and lists of principles
that will work effectively for different
learning styles.
Practicing has become much easier also, now
that
free video poker games have become so
prevalent online. Games like these allow you to
play online with no download and no cost, and
they're played using the same rules as the video
poker games found in traditional land-based
casinos.
