Video Poker Simulator Strategy

• Free Poker Simulator
• Video Poker Simulator Strategy
• Video Poker Simulator Strategy Games
• Video Poker Basic Strategy
• Best Strategy For Video Poker
• Video Poker Simulator Strategy Guide Pdf

This video poker strategy page and the accompanying section have a single goal—to help you get the best odds when gambling at a casino. Video poker, unlike many casino games, offers you at least some degree of control over the odds. Games like roulette and slot machines have no strategy. The decisions you make are essentially meaningless.

Video poker, on the other hand, resembles blackjack. You can use strategic thinking to improve your chances of winning and decrease the house edge. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise, as both games use a deck of cards to play. Of course, in the case of blackjack, you're usually looking at a real deck of cards. In video poker, you're using a virtual deck that's actually being simulated using a random number generator.

Jacks or Better is the most common video poker game. The name 'Jacks or Better' means that the lowest winning hand is a pair of Jacks. Optimal Strategy and Rule Variations With optimal strategy standard 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54% (0.46% house edge). The Video Poker Calculator allows you to manually enter the 5 cards you've been dealt, and then tells you the ideal way to play the hand - that is which cards to hold and which cards to drop to draw new cards.

But legitimate video poker games duplicate the odds you'd see if you were using a real deck of cards.

And that's why you can use a strategy to improve your odds. We talk more about that in the next section.

Why Does Video Poker Have a Strategy?

When you're playing a slot machine, you have no idea what the probability of a particular symbol coming up on a particular reel is. That probability is determined by the random number generator.

A random number generator is a computer program that constantly cycles through numbers at the rate of thousands of numbers per second. Each number corresponds to a different stop on the reel in a slot machine game. Or in the case of a video poker game, each number corresponds to a playing card.

But since you don't know anything about the probability of getting a particular symbol on a slot machine game, it's impossible to make any kind of strategic decision.

In fact, even if you DID know the probabilities of getting each symbol on the reel, you still wouldn't be able to make a decision that would affect your outcome.

There are no decisions to be made. You put your money in, your spin the reels, and you accept the outcome.

Several, if not most, casino games are like this. You have no way of affecting the odds no matter how smart you are. The odds of winning a single number bet in roulette are 37 to 1, no matter what kind of strategy you use.

That's why video poker (and blackjack) are different. You DO have the opportunity to make decisions which affect your outcome.

Understanding why requires looking into the math behind the game a little bit.

Expected Return, Payback Percentages & the House Edge

The expected return of a bet, video poker or otherwise, can be calculated if you know the probability of winning and losing. You also need to know how much you stand to win and how much you stand to lose.

You multiply the probability of winning by the amount you're going to win. You multiply the probability of losing by the amount you're going to lose. You add those two numbers together to get your overall expectation.

Suppose we set up a really simple gambling game where you're going to flip a coin. If you guess the correct outcome, you win 25 cents. But if you're wrong, you lose 50 cents.

In this example you have a 50% chance of winning and a 50% chance of losing. 50% of 25 cents is 12.5 cents, which is the first part of your equation. 50% of 50 cents is -25 cents. (It's negative because that's the amount you lose.)

Your expected loss on that bet is 12.5 cents.

You won't lose 12.5 cents every time. That would be impossible.

But if you tallied all your net wins and losses over time, and if you played for a long time, your results would eventually start to conform to the mathematical expectation.

Return is usually measured as a percentage. In this case, 12.5 cents is 50% of the original bet, so your expected return is -50%.

That's an awful bet. Most experienced gamblers wouldn't take it.

But it's an example of how the casino gets its edge in every game in the casino.

This same kind of math can be applied to video poker games and to slot machine games to determine a payback percentage. The payback percentage is just the amount of money you expect to win back from the casino for every $100 you wager over a long period of time.

Keep in mind that in the short run, anything can and often will happen. You can win a big jackpot early in your session, and your results won't look anything like the mathematically expected payback percentage.

But the longer you play, the closer your results will get to the mathematically predicted results. Over an infinite number of trials, you would certainly have results which mirror the mathematical prediction.

The house edge, on the other hand, is the amount of each bet that the house mathematically expects to keep. It's the opposite of the payback percentage.

In the case of a full pay Jacks or Better game, the payback percentage is 99.54%. So the house edge is 0.46%.

That means for every $100 you bet, the casino expects you to win $99.54. They expect to win 46 cents.

Those are long term expectations, though. In the short run, anything can happen.

All of that background is necessary for understanding why video poker strategy matters.

Since you know the odds of being dealt a particular hand, and you know the odds of improving a hand, you can compare your choices in a video poker game to go with the choice that has the better expected return.

You're playing Jacks or Better, and you have 4 cards to a royal flush, but you also have a pair. Mybookie bonus codes. You could play this hand in a number of ways.

You have a number of options in this example:

• You could throw all 5 cards away and start over. That's obviously the play with the lowest expected value.
• You could throw away all the cards except the pair. In this case, you're hoping to improve your hand to 2 pairs, 3 of a kind, or a full house.
• Or you could throw away the card that makes the pair and try to draw the royal flush.

Since you have a pair, you have a 100% chance of winning at least 1 unit. That's an expected value of $1. But it's actually a little better than that, because you also have the chance to improve the hand. Let's just call it an expected value move of $1.50.

But a royal flush has a payout of 800 to 1. The odds of drawing the card you need for that hand are 1 in 47, but any time you get a 46 to 1 shot at an 800 to 1 payout, you should take it. The expected value of that play is huge.

You have a roughly 2% chance of winning $800. That's $16. You also have a roughly 98% chance of losing $1. That's -98 cents.

$16 – 98 cents = $15.02, which is a heck of a lot more than $1.50.

The correct choice is clear, even though you're going to lose this bet more often than not. On the occasions when you do win, your winnings are going to be so large that they'll make up for all the times you lost the bet and then some.

Not all situations in video poker are that clear. In fact, a human can't just sit there and work out the correct play in every situation using a pencil and paper.

Luckily, we have computers for that.

You can find a video poker strategy chart for just about any variation available. In fact, you can even find websites which will generate the perfect strategy for you based on the game and the pay table that you input.

Here's how such a strategy chart works:

• You get a list of hands.
• At the top of the list is the best possible hand.
• You work your way down the list until you find a hand that matches what you have.
• When you get to that hand, you stop and keep the cards that are listed.

Almost all video poker strategy charts start with a royal flush as the top listed hand. That makes sense. After all, you would never throw away the top paying hand in the game. That would just be silly.

In most games, 4 of a kind and a straight flush will also be at the top of the list—those are usually the top 3 hands with the best payouts.

But the next best hand after that?

You'll always hold on to 4 cards to a royal flush.

That's some strategy advice based on Jacks or Better, but the strategy for Deuces Wild is a little bit different.

Free Poker Simulator

For one thing, you'll always look at lists of potential hands based on how many deuces you have. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is that you never discard a 2.

Then based on how many deuces you have in your hand, you have a list of potential hands to choose from. Start at the top and work your way down.

Another way of thinking about video poker strategy is to think about potentially conflicting hands.

You have 3 cards to a royal flush, but you also have a pair. Do you keep the pair, or do you go for the royal flush?

In this case, you keep the pair. Your odds of hitting the royal flush go down exponentially when you need 2 cards to complete your hand.

In probability, when you want to know the odds of event A happening AND event B happening at the same time, you multiple the probabilities by each other.

In the event of filling a royal flush, each card has a 1/47 chance of showing up. The odds of getting both cards are 1/47 X 1/47, which is about 1 in 2500. And 800 to 1 payout doesn't warrant that kind of risk, especially if you've got a sure winning in your hand already.

The strategy varies from game to game because the payouts vary from game to game. In Bonus Poker, which is basically just Jacks or Better with a bonus payout for a 4 of a kind, you might be more likely to draw to your 4 of a kind in certain instances.

In Deuces Wild, the presence of the wild card makes a huge difference to how you play your hands. You need much stronger hands to win, but those wild cards make it easier to get those hands. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is to never discard a deuce.

The basics of Jacks or Better strategy are pretty simple.

First check to see if you have one of the following 3 paying hands:

If you have any of those, keep what you've got and collect your winnings.

If you don't have any of those, check to see if you have 4 cards to a royal flush. If you do, keep those 4 cards and try to hit the royal.

4 cards to a royal flush trumps everything except those 3 hands we mentioned above.

If you don't have 4 cards to a royal flush, then look to see if you have any of these other 'made hands':

• Full House
• Flush
• Straight
• 3 of a Kind

If you have any of those, keep it and collect your winnings.

If not, check to see if you have 4 cards to a straight flush. If you do, then draw to that straight flush.

Then check to see if you have one of the following 2 paying hands:

You'll keep those over the other options below.

Video Poker Simulator Strategy

Once you get to that point, you're looking at speculative hands. Your best speculative hand at this point is 3 cards to a royal flush. It's a long shot, but if you don't already have one of the other hands listed above, that's what you should go for.

Then if you have 4 to a flush, try to fill your flush.

If you have a low pair, try to draw to 3 of a kind or better.

A full strategy chart will have several more hands for you to go through, but you get the idea.

Jacks or Better strategy just isn't that hard. Even though this isn't a complete strategy chart, you're probably only giving up a few tenths of a percent of payback percentage following these guidelines.

Our guide to Jacks or Better video poker covers the correct strategy in more detail.

Content

If you have 4 deuces, you'll keep them.

If you have 3 deuces, you'll keep them. You're hoping for a royal flush.

If you have 2 deuces, you'll keep both of them. You'll hope for a 4 of a kind or better, but if you don't have that, try for a royal flush or a straight flush.

If you only have one deuce, strategy gets a little harder. But it's still just a list to go down:

• 4 of a Kind or better
• 4 to a Royal Flush
• Full House
• 4 to a Straight Flush
• Flush, Straight, or 3 of a Kind
• 3 to a Royal Flush

And so on.

The payback percentages for Deuces Wild games are all over the place. Unlike Jacks or Better, which has an easy to understand system for adjusting the payback percentage, Deuces Wild pay tables can vary quite a bit from one another.

Your best bet, when choosing a Deuces Wild game, is to use some kind of online tool to determine the payback percentage for the game with the pay table you're considering.

For a detailed discussion of Deuces Wild strategy, please see our page on Deuces Wild video poker.

The optimal strategy for Bonus Poker, which offers a bonus payout for 4 of a kind hands, is so similar to the optimal strategy for Jacks or Better as to be almost indistinguishable.

If you just used the same strategy, you'd probably be giving up less than 0.2%.

It is good to know how to play Bonus Poker, though, because in many of today's casinos, it's the video poker game with the highest payout percentage.

We have an entire page dedicated to Bonus Poker, and it includes detailed strategy advice.

Joker Poker has some similarities to Deuces Wild, but it's not as complicated. You'll only ever see a single joker in the deck, which changes the texture of the possible hands considerably.

Can you bet on the preakness online. You'll basically be presented with 2 basic strategy charts—one to follow if your hand includes a joker, and one to follow if it doesn't. The differences are subtle in some cases, but it's not too complicated.

We offer a full page on Joker Poker, too, which also includes a detailed discussion of the correct strategy for playing that game.

Video poker strategy resembles basic strategy in blackjack in many ways. They both represent the optimal way of playing every possible hand you could get.

Of course, the differences are obvious, too. Your goals in video poker are quite different from your goals in blackjack.

Most video poker strategy is just presented as a list. You start at the top, work your way down, and stop when you get to the hand that matches what you're holding in your hand. Then you keep the appropriate cards and move on.

We offer detailed strategies for almost all of the video poker games on our site on the appropriate pages. Please visit this page for a complete list of all the games we cover.

You may also be interested the following pages. These cover a range of subjects related to video poker strategy.

Video Poker Strategy Articles

• Video Poker Trainers
• Video Poker for Winner
• Video Poker Bankroll
• Video Poker Books
• Video Poker Cheat Sheets
• Video Poker Calculators
• Video Poker Comps
• Video Poker Double Up Feature
• Video Poker EV (Expected Value)
• Video Poker Hands and Hand Analyzers
• Video Poker House Edge
• Video Poker Lessons
• Video Poker Odds and Probability
• Video Poker Royal Flush Odds & Strategy
• Video Poker Risk of Ruin and Variance
• Video Poker Tutorial
• Bob Dancer: Video Poker Expert
• Jean Scott: The Frugal Gambler

I've written multiple posts about the value of various free game simulators and whether it's worth practicing on them.

For the most part, such simulators are free versions of games from various online casinos. But video poker is a horse of a different color. A good video poker trainer can be worth its weight in Bitcoin.

In this post, I look at how to use a video poker trainer to get the most out of your casino gambling hobby.

Why Gamblers Should Love Video Poker

I'm not a fan of slot machines. They cost gamblers too much money. I always suggest they play video poker instead.

Not only does video poker have a lower house edge, but the decisions you make during a video poker game affect the math behind the game. Make good decisions, and the house edge is lower. In that respect, video poker resembles blackjack.

I like to play games where I have at least some agency, and I don't get that from games like roulette or slot machines. In those games, my results are entirely based on chance.

But in video poker, I can make decisions based on the odds about which cards to keep and which cards to discard. And if I make good decisions, I'll face a lower house edge.

With the right pay tables and the right strategies, you can usually find a real money video poker game in any major casino with a payback percentage of 98% or more.

If you combine the right pay tables with the best players clubs, you can even play with an advantage over the casino. But you must put in the practice to make this happen.

How Video Poker Strategy Works

When you're dealt a hand in video poker, you get five cards, and you can keep or discard any number of cards—from zero to five.

Keeping some combinations of cards has a higher expected value than keeping other combinations of cards.

What does that mean? Well, expected value is a statistical measure of how much you can expect to win or lose on a bet in a specific situation. It's just the probability of the various prizes multiplied by the amounts you win if you hit those hands.

A royal flush has the highest payout of any hand in video poker. If you're playing for max coin, you get a payout of 800 for 1 when you hit this hand. When you get four cards to a royal flush, you can discard the extra card and have a 1 in 47 probability of getting the card you need to make your royal flush. 1/47 x 800 amounts to an expected value for that play of 17.02.

You also have probabilities of getting other winning hands which add to that expected value. If you're playing Jacks or Better, for example, some of the cards will have the potential to make a big pair. You don't have a way of making three of a kind or four of a kind here, but you also have lots of potential for making a flush or a straight.

But what if one of the cards in that hand pairs one of the other cards? You might have a pat hand—one that's guaranteed to pay out.

Is a 100% probability of that payout better than the approximately 2% probability of hitting that royal flush? Obviously not. A pair only pays off at even money in Jacks or Better, so even if the hand improves, it's not going to have an expected value greater than 17.

Video Poker Simulator Strategy Games

Every situation in video poker works this way; you must decide which cards to keep and throw away based on the expected value behind that move.

Video Poker Strategy Tables Help Get the Lowest House Edge

In blackjack, you can use a basic strategy chart to inform your playing decision. If you follow the basic strategy, you're going to see a house edge of between 0.5% and 1%.

Video poker games also have strategy charts, but they're different from the blackjack charts. A video poker strategy table just has a list of potential card combinations listed from best to worst. You compare the cards you have with the cards on the table and choose the combination that's highest on your chart.

Those are the cards you keep. The other cards, you can discard. Video poker strategy charts are, of necessity, approximations. They all sacrifice a minor tenth of a hundredth of a percentage for playability's sake.

If you created a video poker strategy chart that covered every potential situation, it would be so long as to be useless. But the best thing for most people to do is learn video poker strategy using a video poker trainer.

What's a Video Poker Trainer and How Does It Work?

A video poker trainer is a computer program that simulates a video poker game. You can choose the game and the pay table for the game you want to learn how to play. You then play that version of video poker in the trainer, which advises you when you've made a less-than-optimal decision.

Notice the difference between a video poker simulator and most of the other casino game simulators I've written about before now. Sure, you can find blackjack trainers that provide you with a play money game to practice on.

But other games, like craps and roulette, have no strategy. There's no need for some kind of training software, so the easiest way to access a simulator is by using the play money games from the online casinos.

Video poker trainers aren't exactly free. They're like a lot of software and a lot of apps. They require a purchase from you.

But once you've bought the trainer, you don't have to risk money while you play. The credits on the simulated game have no dollar value at all. They're just a means of keeping score.

The WinPoker App

One of my favorite video poker training software packages is called WinPoker. It's a video poker trainer that will teach you how to play video poker with near-perfect strategy. It's free to a certain extent but will warrant a purchase for all the features.

If you download the software online, you can spend less than $40 and have state-of-the-art video poker training.

Video Poker Basic Strategy

Other Video Poker Trainers

If you're playing from the United States, you're out of luck. But if you're playing from elsewhere in the world, you might consider Microgaming-powered casinos. All their games check your decisions to see if you're making the strategically correct move.

They've offered this feature for years, but it comes with a catch. You're playing for real money at these online casinos. And even at a Microgaming casino, you're facing a house edge when playing video poker.

That's some strategy advice based on Jacks or Better, but the strategy for Deuces Wild is a little bit different.

Free Poker Simulator

For one thing, you'll always look at lists of potential hands based on how many deuces you have. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is that you never discard a 2.

Then based on how many deuces you have in your hand, you have a list of potential hands to choose from. Start at the top and work your way down.

Another way of thinking about video poker strategy is to think about potentially conflicting hands.

You have 3 cards to a royal flush, but you also have a pair. Do you keep the pair, or do you go for the royal flush?

In this case, you keep the pair. Your odds of hitting the royal flush go down exponentially when you need 2 cards to complete your hand.

In probability, when you want to know the odds of event A happening AND event B happening at the same time, you multiple the probabilities by each other.

In the event of filling a royal flush, each card has a 1/47 chance of showing up. The odds of getting both cards are 1/47 X 1/47, which is about 1 in 2500. And 800 to 1 payout doesn't warrant that kind of risk, especially if you've got a sure winning in your hand already.

The strategy varies from game to game because the payouts vary from game to game. In Bonus Poker, which is basically just Jacks or Better with a bonus payout for a 4 of a kind, you might be more likely to draw to your 4 of a kind in certain instances.

In Deuces Wild, the presence of the wild card makes a huge difference to how you play your hands. You need much stronger hands to win, but those wild cards make it easier to get those hands. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is to never discard a deuce.

The basics of Jacks or Better strategy are pretty simple.

First check to see if you have one of the following 3 paying hands:

If you have any of those, keep what you've got and collect your winnings.

If you don't have any of those, check to see if you have 4 cards to a royal flush. If you do, keep those 4 cards and try to hit the royal.

4 cards to a royal flush trumps everything except those 3 hands we mentioned above.

If you don't have 4 cards to a royal flush, then look to see if you have any of these other 'made hands':

• Full House
• Flush
• Straight
• 3 of a Kind

If you have any of those, keep it and collect your winnings.

If not, check to see if you have 4 cards to a straight flush. If you do, then draw to that straight flush.

Then check to see if you have one of the following 2 paying hands:

You'll keep those over the other options below.

Video Poker Simulator Strategy

Once you get to that point, you're looking at speculative hands. Your best speculative hand at this point is 3 cards to a royal flush. It's a long shot, but if you don't already have one of the other hands listed above, that's what you should go for.

Then if you have 4 to a flush, try to fill your flush.

If you have a low pair, try to draw to 3 of a kind or better.

A full strategy chart will have several more hands for you to go through, but you get the idea.

Jacks or Better strategy just isn't that hard. Even though this isn't a complete strategy chart, you're probably only giving up a few tenths of a percent of payback percentage following these guidelines.

Our guide to Jacks or Better video poker covers the correct strategy in more detail.

Content

If you have 4 deuces, you'll keep them.

If you have 3 deuces, you'll keep them. You're hoping for a royal flush.

If you have 2 deuces, you'll keep both of them. You'll hope for a 4 of a kind or better, but if you don't have that, try for a royal flush or a straight flush.

If you only have one deuce, strategy gets a little harder. But it's still just a list to go down:

• 4 of a Kind or better
• 4 to a Royal Flush
• Full House
• 4 to a Straight Flush
• Flush, Straight, or 3 of a Kind
• 3 to a Royal Flush

And so on.

The payback percentages for Deuces Wild games are all over the place. Unlike Jacks or Better, which has an easy to understand system for adjusting the payback percentage, Deuces Wild pay tables can vary quite a bit from one another.

Your best bet, when choosing a Deuces Wild game, is to use some kind of online tool to determine the payback percentage for the game with the pay table you're considering.

For a detailed discussion of Deuces Wild strategy, please see our page on Deuces Wild video poker.

The optimal strategy for Bonus Poker, which offers a bonus payout for 4 of a kind hands, is so similar to the optimal strategy for Jacks or Better as to be almost indistinguishable.

If you just used the same strategy, you'd probably be giving up less than 0.2%.

It is good to know how to play Bonus Poker, though, because in many of today's casinos, it's the video poker game with the highest payout percentage.

We have an entire page dedicated to Bonus Poker, and it includes detailed strategy advice.

Joker Poker has some similarities to Deuces Wild, but it's not as complicated. You'll only ever see a single joker in the deck, which changes the texture of the possible hands considerably.

Can you bet on the preakness online. You'll basically be presented with 2 basic strategy charts—one to follow if your hand includes a joker, and one to follow if it doesn't. The differences are subtle in some cases, but it's not too complicated.

We offer a full page on Joker Poker, too, which also includes a detailed discussion of the correct strategy for playing that game.

Video poker strategy resembles basic strategy in blackjack in many ways. They both represent the optimal way of playing every possible hand you could get.

Of course, the differences are obvious, too. Your goals in video poker are quite different from your goals in blackjack.

Most video poker strategy is just presented as a list. You start at the top, work your way down, and stop when you get to the hand that matches what you're holding in your hand. Then you keep the appropriate cards and move on.

We offer detailed strategies for almost all of the video poker games on our site on the appropriate pages. Please visit this page for a complete list of all the games we cover.

You may also be interested the following pages. These cover a range of subjects related to video poker strategy.

Video Poker Strategy Articles

• Video Poker Trainers
• Video Poker for Winner
• Video Poker Bankroll
• Video Poker Books
• Video Poker Cheat Sheets
• Video Poker Calculators
• Video Poker Comps
• Video Poker Double Up Feature
• Video Poker EV (Expected Value)
• Video Poker Hands and Hand Analyzers
• Video Poker House Edge
• Video Poker Lessons
• Video Poker Odds and Probability
• Video Poker Royal Flush Odds & Strategy
• Video Poker Risk of Ruin and Variance
• Video Poker Tutorial
• Bob Dancer: Video Poker Expert
• Jean Scott: The Frugal Gambler

I've written multiple posts about the value of various free game simulators and whether it's worth practicing on them.

For the most part, such simulators are free versions of games from various online casinos. But video poker is a horse of a different color. A good video poker trainer can be worth its weight in Bitcoin.

In this post, I look at how to use a video poker trainer to get the most out of your casino gambling hobby.

Why Gamblers Should Love Video Poker

I'm not a fan of slot machines. They cost gamblers too much money. I always suggest they play video poker instead.

Not only does video poker have a lower house edge, but the decisions you make during a video poker game affect the math behind the game. Make good decisions, and the house edge is lower. In that respect, video poker resembles blackjack.

I like to play games where I have at least some agency, and I don't get that from games like roulette or slot machines. In those games, my results are entirely based on chance.

But in video poker, I can make decisions based on the odds about which cards to keep and which cards to discard. And if I make good decisions, I'll face a lower house edge.

With the right pay tables and the right strategies, you can usually find a real money video poker game in any major casino with a payback percentage of 98% or more.

If you combine the right pay tables with the best players clubs, you can even play with an advantage over the casino. But you must put in the practice to make this happen.

How Video Poker Strategy Works

When you're dealt a hand in video poker, you get five cards, and you can keep or discard any number of cards—from zero to five.

Keeping some combinations of cards has a higher expected value than keeping other combinations of cards.

What does that mean? Well, expected value is a statistical measure of how much you can expect to win or lose on a bet in a specific situation. It's just the probability of the various prizes multiplied by the amounts you win if you hit those hands.

A royal flush has the highest payout of any hand in video poker. If you're playing for max coin, you get a payout of 800 for 1 when you hit this hand. When you get four cards to a royal flush, you can discard the extra card and have a 1 in 47 probability of getting the card you need to make your royal flush. 1/47 x 800 amounts to an expected value for that play of 17.02.

You also have probabilities of getting other winning hands which add to that expected value. If you're playing Jacks or Better, for example, some of the cards will have the potential to make a big pair. You don't have a way of making three of a kind or four of a kind here, but you also have lots of potential for making a flush or a straight.

But what if one of the cards in that hand pairs one of the other cards? You might have a pat hand—one that's guaranteed to pay out.

Is a 100% probability of that payout better than the approximately 2% probability of hitting that royal flush? Obviously not. A pair only pays off at even money in Jacks or Better, so even if the hand improves, it's not going to have an expected value greater than 17.

Video Poker Simulator Strategy Games

Every situation in video poker works this way; you must decide which cards to keep and throw away based on the expected value behind that move.

Video Poker Strategy Tables Help Get the Lowest House Edge

In blackjack, you can use a basic strategy chart to inform your playing decision. If you follow the basic strategy, you're going to see a house edge of between 0.5% and 1%.

Video poker games also have strategy charts, but they're different from the blackjack charts. A video poker strategy table just has a list of potential card combinations listed from best to worst. You compare the cards you have with the cards on the table and choose the combination that's highest on your chart.

Those are the cards you keep. The other cards, you can discard. Video poker strategy charts are, of necessity, approximations. They all sacrifice a minor tenth of a hundredth of a percentage for playability's sake.

If you created a video poker strategy chart that covered every potential situation, it would be so long as to be useless. But the best thing for most people to do is learn video poker strategy using a video poker trainer.

What's a Video Poker Trainer and How Does It Work?

A video poker trainer is a computer program that simulates a video poker game. You can choose the game and the pay table for the game you want to learn how to play. You then play that version of video poker in the trainer, which advises you when you've made a less-than-optimal decision.

Notice the difference between a video poker simulator and most of the other casino game simulators I've written about before now. Sure, you can find blackjack trainers that provide you with a play money game to practice on.

But other games, like craps and roulette, have no strategy. There's no need for some kind of training software, so the easiest way to access a simulator is by using the play money games from the online casinos.

Video poker trainers aren't exactly free. They're like a lot of software and a lot of apps. They require a purchase from you.

But once you've bought the trainer, you don't have to risk money while you play. The credits on the simulated game have no dollar value at all. They're just a means of keeping score.

The WinPoker App

One of my favorite video poker training software packages is called WinPoker. It's a video poker trainer that will teach you how to play video poker with near-perfect strategy. It's free to a certain extent but will warrant a purchase for all the features.

If you download the software online, you can spend less than $40 and have state-of-the-art video poker training.

Video Poker Basic Strategy

Other Video Poker Trainers

If you're playing from the United States, you're out of luck. But if you're playing from elsewhere in the world, you might consider Microgaming-powered casinos. All their games check your decisions to see if you're making the strategically correct move.

They've offered this feature for years, but it comes with a catch. You're playing for real money at these online casinos. And even at a Microgaming casino, you're facing a house edge when playing video poker.

If you're looking for a way to train on video poker games without having to risk your own money, you're stuck buying a software package.

Bob Dancer's Video Poker for Winners is another great software package you can use as a video poker trainer. Unfortunately, the Frugal Video Poker software that Jim Wolf used to produce is no longer compatible with the latest versions of Windows. And it doesn't look like there are any plans to update the product.

Dan Paymar also sells a video poker trainer program, but you must use a Mac. It's not compatible with a PC running on windows.

Best Strategy For Video Poker

Should You Use a Video Poker Trainer?

If you're serious or even semi-serious about playing video poker on a regular basis, using a video poker trainer is a great idea. The software isn't expensive, and if you get good enough at video poker, it will pay for itself many times over.

I'm sure some of my readers will scoff at the idea of spending $50 or so on a training software, but they'll easily lose that much money in a single trip to the casino by making multiple strategy mistakes on their video poker games.

They should probably just switch to roulette or slot machines if they're not interested in playing video poker optimally. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Video Poker Simulator Strategy Guide Pdf

Conclusion

With any casino game, your goal should be to get the house edge as low as possible. Video poker offers the opportunity to do that by playing each hand optimally. But most people can't do that intuitively.

Video poker strategy is a learned skill, and the strategy for different varieties of video poker are often different. A video poker trainer is the best solution.