The most important point in video poker is that you are playing against a machine with a fixed payout schedule, and there are no other players at the table. In table poker, if your hand is better than that of any other player at the table, you win the entire pot. You could win with a very poor hand, if that is the best there is - or you could lose with a very good hand if someone else has a better one. To win a hand in video poker, it must simply match one of the hands defined on the posted payout schedule. You don’t have to beat anyone.

Another important point is that the rank of a winning combination is usually immaterial. That is, three kings pay the same as three deuces, and an aces-up two pair pays the same as any other two pair. And finally, you can’t fold your hand, so you must draw no matter how bad a hand you were dealt.

Many players who have never seen any video poker strategy information continue to apply their own draw poker strategy. They do things such as keeping an ace or face-card kicker when drawing to a pair. This fools nobody (there aren’t any other players to fool) and, although it doesn’t change the probability of drawing another pair, it greatly reduces the odds of drawing three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind, or a full house. In other words: Never keep a kicker.

In the table game a player would normally drop out rather than draw four cards to a single face card. Since dropping is not an option in video poker, holding one face card is frequently done in a jacks-or-better game. For a garbage hand that doesn’t even have a low pair or a face card, it is appropriate to draw five new cards. These situations are all covered in the playing strategy tables.

Video poker is a machine version of a popular form of poker called five-card draw or, more simply, draw poker. In the most common version of video poker, a five-card hand is randomly dealt by the machine. The player then gets to discard any or all of the cards in the dealt hand, which are replaced by new ones. Choosing which cards to hold and which to discard to maximize the payback requires correct playing strategy. There are a number of game variations, but almost all of them are based on a one-time replacement of any of the cards in a five-card hand.

It is easy to find standard video poker machines that pay back more than 98 percent and some that pay back more than 100 percent when perfect playing strategy is applied. Whereas the payback of any particular traditional slot machine is a mystery, this is not true of video poker. Every video poker machine has its complete payout schedule posted on the video screen or on the glass display above the screen. Using this information, the overall payback of that machine can be computed.

To take full advantage of the potentially high payback in video poker requires two important actions. The first is finding a video poker machine with a payout schedule that provides a high payback. The second is using the best strategy when playing that machine. It is the purpose of this post to
provide the information needed for a player to do both in a simple and effective manner.