Video poker is not live poker, and except for how you evaluate the hands, it bears little resemblance to the table game.
Video poker is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating back to only the mid-Seventies. Although early slot machines used cards and poker hands as payout symbols, players had no choices to make; the reels stopped wherever the machine determined they would.
The increasing popularity of video poker can be traced to several factors and characteristics it has in common with many of the more popular casino games. For instance:
– It’s fast (like craps).
– It gives players the opportunity to make decisions and a reasonable control over the results (like blackjack).
– It’s similar to poker (like many of the newest casino games).
– It gives the possibility of a large payout and is not intimidating (like slot machines).
– You can play it for a low minimum, an investment as small as a few coins.
Maybe what makes it even more popular is that it returns your investment for a pair of Jacks to Aces. In effect, this makes the player feel that a tie (a push) is a win. This is an important psychological factor that makes it seem like you’re winning more than you actually are. Maybe it’s because when you drop a coin into the machine, you consider that a lost coin, so that when it reappears on an even-money payout, you feel like you’re a winner. It’s a subtle point, but a powerful one.
Perhaps the chief reason that video poker is becoming more popular is that even a casual player can determine the value of an individual machine. By simply glancing at the pay table included on every video poker game, you can determine how much that machine will pay back to players who use the optimum video poker strategy, or expert strategy.
Playing winning video poker requires three very important tenets. First, you should only play machines that give you the highest payout. Second, you must know how to use the best strategies to play those machines. And finally, you should be aware of how those machines reach those payout percentages. That is, you must be aware of whether that payout percentage is reached by awarding a single large jackpot or whether it encompasses many smaller payouts. The level of frequency of the payoffos is called the volatility of the machine.
Many machines can be played to pay back more than 100 per cent of the money invested. How is this possible, you ask? Isn’t the casino going to lose money by putting these types of machines on the floor?
This question has two answers. Yes, the casino would lose money if every player on that particular machine understood and used expert strategy. But since only a small minority of video poker players truly know how to take advantage of
such a machine, no, the casino will not lose money by offering such a machine. And even if it was just expert players that were attracted to such a machine, they wouldn’t all be able to play at the same time. Therefore, the casino would undoubtedly surround that machine with others offering a significantly lower payout than that single 100 per cent-plus machine, guaranteeing the casino the chance to win more money from those other players.