Play Carefully – You don’t have a dealer or other players waiting on you, so take your time and make the best decisions.
No Memory – The video poker machines have no memory. The random number generator insures it. Play each hand like you don’t remember what happened in the last hand.
Playing Hunches – There are many who know the strategy, but still play hunches. This is fine as long as you realize that you are lowering your odds of winning for the pleasure of playing the hunch. Sometimes hunches work and it feels pretty good.
Know the Paytables – Understanding the paytables, and using them to find better machines, is the single most important thing you can do to increase your winnings.
Here are some typical Jacks or Better Video Poker paytables:
The tables above assume maximum credit play (with a Royal paying 4000 credits) and the percentages are rounded. Notice that the only differences in the pay tables are the credits won for a full house or a flush. This is what accounts for the differences in payout percentages. Since the odds of receiving winning hands remain the same, there is absolutely no reason to play a machine that only pays 6 credits for a full house and 5 credits for a flush (a “6/5” machine). Always play the 9/6 machines when you can.
There are a variety of games and paytables to be found. If you’d like to calculate the payout of a particular machine based on its paytables, visit our shareware video poker section.
