Video poker is the most popular game of chance among casino patrons in the U.S. Eighty percent of respondents to a recent survey in Las Vegas said they played VP, basically draw poker in slot-machine form. Players pick discards from five cards showing, or stand with a pat hand.
Video Poker Tips 1
Pay close attention to the all important "hold" button. Some people hit it too fast or not hard enough and a card meant to be held is discarded. Make sure all the cards you want to hold are held before pushing the draw button.
Video Poker Tips 2
Check each machine you play. Some have hold buttons, others discard buttons. Don't push any buttons before you understand what you're doing.
Video Poker Tips 3
Pick a strategy and stick with it. Are you going for a big money Royal Flush, with the biggest payback but odds of 650,000 to 1? Or do you want to play a long time with the best payback? Conservative players would keep a pair, for instance, while others might break a pair if there was a chance for a Royal Flush.
Video Poker Tips 4
Never keep a "kicker" -- a high card in addition to a pair. The odds are against this strategy working out for you.
Video Poker Tips 5
Seek out Jacks or better machines that pay 9 coins for a full house and six coins for a flush.
If you decide to play a progressive VP machine that pays 8 coins for a full house and 5 for a flush, play on a progressive where the jackpot is over $250 on a nickel machine, $2,500 on a quarter, and $10,000 for the dollar.
Video Poker Tips 6
Always bet the maximum amount of coins on a progressive machine to get the bonus for royal flushes.
Video Poker Tips 7
If you are a novice player, play on the lowest denomination machine until your level of expertise rises.
Take your time to study every hand. Because you are playing against a machine, no one will intimidate you if your play is too slow.
Video Poker Tips 8
All hail the Jack! Some players don't realize the ace is not the most important card in the deck, but the Jack is. Holding the Jack over the ace gives you more opportunities of making more lucrative hands than an ace would.
Video Poker Tips 9
There are more than a hundred different VP machines to choose from. Games like Joker Poker, Louisiana Jacks, Gator Poker, etc. offer you a supermarket selection, but all have different paytables needing distinct playing strategies. I recommend learning and limiting your play to two, such as Deuces Wild and Jacks-or-Better.
Acquire VP skills using either a computer or a hand-held VP game. The major benefit of this type of training is the ability to test you skills with no financial risk or ruin. You can gather data later review, enabling you to nix trends that would be costly on a VP machine. This information would take you years to accumulate under normal casino conditions. And again, the key here is that any knowledge obtained without a casino outlay lets you net out better down the road.
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