Video Poker : Playing Tips – by Jason A. Martin

Like to play video poker machines? Step into any casino in Las Vegas and one thing you will quickly notice is that the casinos spend a lot of layout space on machines. Much of that layout goes to Video Poker. If you have played Video Poker for any amount of time, you know that not all machines where created equal. As the years have gone by, more and more ?specialty? video poker machines have come into being. Today, I am going to share some of my Video Poker tips from WiseBettor.com with you. I hope you will enjoy them.

Tip One: Finding a good machine

Finding a good machine is as simple as looking at the payout schedule. You really want to stay away from specialty pay machines that have larger top payouts, but negate the lower payouts. For example, a machine might pay a little more on four of a kind, but will pay less on two pair, flushes and full houses. Since you will rack up lower scale payouts often, because of the probability of receiving these hands, you want a strong lower scale payout system.

Tip Two: Playing strategy

Learning how to play properly (optimally) is a must. Your playing strategy will, in the end, determine your average return and your final bankroll amount. Knowing what to do in a situation where you have, for example, two Kings, but four to the flush is vital. Do you keep the Kings and the guaranteed money or roll the dice for the harder to hit flush? Playing a good machine with a good strategy will give you a great opportunity to win money over the long run.

Tip Three: It?s random

Over the years, I have watched people play Video Poker in Las Vegas using all sorts of superstitious movements. Some will only use cold coins to play, some will push the buttons extra hard, some will tap the machine with their money before playing and the list goes on and on. Each hand is setup by a RNG (Random Number Generator). The moment you start to play, the hand is set in stone. The machine will randomly select all the cards from a 52-card deck and deal them out.

Tip Four: There?s no memory

This is a big one. Many players believe that if they start to see hands with three of a kind, four to the royal and so forth that the bigger hands are due any moment. This is simply wrong. As explained in tip three, the system uses a RNG to setup the hands. The system has no memory. It does not know that you have not had a full house in 400 hands or that you just received three four of a kind hands in a row. It?s possible to go 100,000 hands without a four of a kind and it?s possible to get ten in a row. The machine does not keep track, because in the end, the numbers work out.

I hope these tips have helped you grow as a Video Poker player. Misconceptions on how the game works can be far more deadly than simply playing wrong. I have watched people spend (and lose) hundreds of dollars on a machine simply because they believed the machine had a memory and was ?due? to hit. Don?t fall into traps like this. Understand that Video Poker is random and needs to be played properly. Now, go have some fun.



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Video Poker (jacks or Better) Tips – an article by GamingGuide.net Team

Video poker made its entry in the 1970s. It has proven to be a popular form of gaming. Video poker offers players the opportunity to gamble with anonymity, skill and a relatively low “house” advantage.

The objective of video poker is to achieve a winning combination of cards. The player firstly chooses how much to bet on the game. The machine then presents the player with 5 cards. The player chooses which cards, if any, to keep and discards the remaining cards. The machine then replaces the discarded cards with new ones.

The payout schedule displays the machines winning combinations and the values for each combination. These values vary according to the credit bet.

If the player’s last hand of cards form a winning combination, the player is awarded an amount corresponding with this combination and the number of coins bet.

Some machines give players the opportunity to win even more credit, by allowing them to bet their winnings and original bet using a secondary betting system.

There are various forms of video poker, such as ‘Jacks or better’, ‘Aces Faces’, ‘Deuces Wild’ and ‘Joker Wild’. Each is said to have varying rules and strategies.

Basic video poker winning combinations

Below is a list of common video poker winning combinations. Some video poker games incorporate other combinations also.

Royal Flush

A Ten, Jack, Queen, King and Ace, all in the same suite.

Straight Flush

5 cards in sequence and in the same suite.

4 of a Kind

4 cards of the same rank and in any suite + 1 unmatched card.

Full House

3 cards of the same rank and in any suite + 2 cards of the same rank and in any suite.

Flush

5 cards of any rank and in the same suite.

Straight

5 cards in sequence and in any suite.

3 of a Kind

3 cards of the same rank and in any suite + 2 unmatched cards.

2 Pairs

2 cards of the same rank and in any suite + 2 other cards of the same rank and in any suite + 1 unmatched card.

1 Pair

2 cards of the same rank and in any suite + 3 unmatched cards.

‘JACKS OR BETTER’ VIDEO POKER TIPS

This form of video poker generally requires a minimal winning combination of 2 ‘Jacks’. Always check the machine’s payout schedule to confirm this.

Ensure you understand the payout schedule prior to deciding whether to bet and how much to bet on each game. Try to compare different machines and see if any offer a higher payout rate for certain winning combinations, such as for ‘full house’ or ‘flush’.

Generally, it seems more beneficial to bet the maximum amount of credit on each game. The jackpot for a ‘Royal Flush’ combination, for example, is only awarded if the player has bet the maximum number of coins. The problem, however, is that this has the potential to quickly exhaust your wallet. With this in mind, find a machine that best suits your budget. A quarter machine may suit your budget more so than a dollar machine, for example.

If your initial hand of cards does not contain a winning combination but contains a ‘Jack’, ‘Queen’, ‘King’ or ‘Ace’, it may be worthwhile holding onto this card and discarding the other four.

If your initial hand does not contain a winning combination but shows the potential to give you one should you hold certain cards and discard others, consider the probability of obtaining certain combinations versus other combinations.

If your initial hand does not contain a winning combination and seems to hold no promise of one should you hold any cards, consider discarding all 5 cards. The next lot of 5 cards have the potential to give you a winning combination.

If your initial hand contains a winning combination, it is generally less risky to hold on to the cards that form this winning combination than to not do this in the hope of obtaining a higher winning combination. This is probably a question of guaranteed returns versus possibly higher returns that are NOT guaranteed.

If your initial hand contains a ‘4 of a kind’ combination, hold onto all cards as changing the unmatching card will not improve your winning combination.

If your initial hand contains 4 cards needed to achieve a ‘Royal Flush’ or ‘Straight Flush’ but you need one more card to achieve this winning combination, SERIOUSLY CONSIDER holding onto these four cards and discarding the non-matching card. ‘Royal Flush’ and ‘Straight Flush’ combinations are most rewarding.

If your initial hand contains 4 cards needed to achieve a ‘Straight’ or ‘Flush’ but you need one more card to achieve this winning combination, consider holding onto these four cards and discarding the non-matching card. ‘Straight’ and ‘Flush’ combinations are relatively rewarding.

Recognize when a jackpot (large value) has been won. Some machines will ask you to call an attendant who will organize payment to you. Never handle or walk away from a machine that has just produced a jackpot winning. Call the attendant or have someone call him/her for you while you wait at the machine.

Find out if the venue you intend to play at offers other incentives, such as points, meals, accommodation, etc., that goes with your game play. This however doesn’t mean that you should play purely for these secondary benefits.

Practice your strategy for free using a video poker simulator. Many online casinos offer free game play.

Try to recognize when your luck may have changed. There are many examples of people winning significantly then “getting greedy”, so to speak, and losing everything.

Make sure you empty the machine of your credit prior to leaving it. Each year, people accidentally abandon machines that still have their credit inside.

Assign a budget for the day’s play. If the budget is lost, you will know when to leave the casino.

Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.

Remember to always have fun




The Author:

Article written by GamingGuide.net’s Online
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How To Win At Video Poker: The Basics

Here are some of the basics on how to win playing video poker. After a person learns these basics, then they can move on to more of the advanced video poker knowledge.

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Maybe I will play for real money later, but right now I just want to get in some practice before I go to Atlantis in the Bahamas next month.


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Where is the best video poker in Las Vegas?

In other words, you can play the most amount of time and lose the least amount of money doing 5 quarters at once.

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Probabilities of Jackpot in Video Poker – by Elizabeth Tudor

Well, Jack and me are still working our way through these bottles. Not so many of them left now, but we’re not worried — the wannabe supplier got the nod so we’ll get more of his good stuff. As you’ll realize, I’m not an outdoor kinda guy ’cept when I tear myself away from the casinos in my yacht and go where the wind wants to go for a week or so. Even then, my satellite system gets me into the online casinos so, when the real and video poker itch gets too much, I can scratch for a while. Even though I’ve never played the game, I’m thinking these articles of mine are a little like a golf course. And this piece about video poker is one of these tricky little par threes that some of you’ll ace with no problems, and others will find a little more trying than usual. I’ve been talking about the size of the bankroll you’d need if you were serious about turning your video poker itch into a professional paying game. Now, we’re gonna keep on thinking about streaks of bad luck in video poker where you never hit a jackpot. Talking probabilities, one way of describing these streaks is using volatility. My daddy usta say volatility means unconditional variance. He was into all these fancy way of saying things. What he meant was that you keep a record of everything that is relevant over time. So, in video poker, we note every flop, what we hold, what we draw and the result. Every observation is given equal weight to produce the standard deviation of the return we expect over a defined period time, e.g. an annualised calculation. This doesn’t work badly for video poker over time, but if you suddenly wanna calculate current volatility, just looking at the most recently observed data, you’re imposing conditions on or weighting the variances. So all your trend analysis gets more like guesswork. A different and perhaps a better way of thinking about this is to define the range of the values from the largest to the smallest. Now when my daddy was schooling me in math, he usta express upper and lower bounds for the volatility as functions of the range r and sample size n. But we’re not talking about some life assurance or stock market risk assessment system where values are going to move in a more predictable narrow-range pattern. Because the video poker machines are driven by a Random Number Generator and there’s independence between each draw, it ain’t never easy to get reliable results outa volatility calculations. But you see people complaining about volatility when they start on about multihand video poker machines. I reckon this is not so much to do with volatility, it’s more to do with the volume of play. Let’s have you sit down at an old-style video poker machine with only one line. Now this is a machine you can play faster. When I was younger, I could hit 600 hands an hour. Some folks say they can hit up to 800 hands an hour and catch a fish this big. But let’s give you a fair speed of 500 hands per hour on a 9-6 Jacks or Better machine for two hours. The standard deviation for 1,000 hands playing one line is sqrt(number of hands * variance), i.e. sqrt(1000*19.510) = 140 bets (rounded up). Now let’s put you on a machine that plays four lines. You beginners’re gonna find these video poker machines slower to play, so let’s say you hit 300 hands per hour for two hours. You’re now playing sqrt(4 * the number of hands * (variance + three linked lines * the covariance)), i.e. sqrt(4*600*(19.510 + 3*1.966)) = sqrt 60,979 = 247 bets (rounded up). So we wanna make a rough approximation of the swings when playing four lines — and that’s about 76% higher than playing the same coins on a single line. So ya gotta risk more capital to work through to the other side of a cold streak. Ya gotta remember that the distribution of results is non-normal for the number of hands you play in a session. There ain’t no way you can use the normal distribution estimate of plus or minus two standard deviations to give 95% confidence of the results. The better way to estimate confidence is within (1 – 1/(# standard deviation)^2), i.e. you expect to be within plus or minus two standard deviations 75% of the time, and within plus or minus 3 standard deviations 88.9%. This has all kinda strained my brain. Don’t usually do much calculating these days so a lot more alcohol’s gonna flow to make me feel better about it all. That’s me done for the day. Catch ya ’round.



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I need a good casino video poker trainer program?

nefar asked:
What I am looking for is a good casino poker trainer software. Something that has the same games as they do in a casino, jacks or better, deuces wild, progressive and so forth. I need one that assumes you don’t know a thing about poker — It’s for my mother that likes to hit the casino from time to time with her friends. She needs to learn the basics and will need to be told what cards are the best ods to choose on each hand.


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Is Double Double Bonus Video Poker available online?

I am a big video poker fanatic and I love to play double double bonus video poker when I go to the casino. I love the bonus payouts when hitting the kicker with four aces. Where can I play double double bonus poker on the internet?

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$10,000 video poker jackpot

I shared a royal flush in the background video poker 50 games at Harrah 's Laughlin. 5c for a machine that plays 5 coins per line, each royal flush pays $ 200! Full story: www.luckydonut.com

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Video Poker modern art.

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