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Section:
Advice > Gaming Tips
Strategies
for Video Poker
by
Jeffrey Lotspiech
Part
1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part
4
Variations
of Video Poker Machines
Jokers
Wild Machines
The previous
discussion regarding two pair assumes that there is no wild
card in the deck. The jokers wild machines have added a
single joker, and that makes a big difference. The full
payout for a jokers wild machine is:
| Name |
Pays |
Return |
Hits |
| Royal
Flush |
4000 |
1.95% |
1
in 41112 |
| Five
of a Kind |
1000 |
1.87% |
1
in 10706 |
| Wild
Royal Flush |
500 |
1.04% |
1
in 9604 |
| Straight
Flush |
250 |
2.87% |
1
in 1739 |
| Four
of a Kind |
100 |
17.11% |
1
in 116 |
| Full
House |
35 |
10.98% |
1
in 63 |
| Flush |
25 |
7.79% |
1
in 64 |
| Straight |
15 |
4.98% |
1
in 60 |
| Three
of a Kind |
10 |
26.79% |
1
in 7 |
| Two
Pair |
5 |
11.09% |
1
in 9 |
| Kings
or Better |
5 |
14.20% |
1
in 7 |
| TOTAL |
|
100.65% |
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Almost every payout is less than jacks-or-better,
and it has the dreaded 5 coin payout for two pair, and yet
this machine returns 100.6% for optimal play. If you can
find a royal flush payout of 4700, the return increases
to 100.9%, the highest of any machine I have found but one.
It is also the highest variance of any machine. You can
expect big swings if you play jokers wild.
Highlights
of the Jokers Wild Strategy
This is a complicated
machine to play correctly, which is probably why the casinos
make money on them. I find myself constantly having to refer
to the expert strategy sheet for different hands. But here
are some points to keep in mind:
- Straight flushes
are much more important in this game: they pay the same,
but the joker makes them more attainable (five times more
attainable, actually). Thus you usually break up a flush
or three-of-a-kind if you have four cards to the straight
flush. A three-card straight flush with no gaps is better
than a losing pair. With one or two gaps, such a hand
is still almost always better than two cards to the royal.
- On the other
hand, straights are less important because they only pay
15. The old saying "never draw to an inside straight"
is completely true in this game only. A one-gap three-card
straight flush is better than a four-card no-gap plain
straight.
- When you have
a joker and no other obvious cards to save, always check
to see if you have two other cards that could be part
of a straight flush. If so, hold them. If not, most other
authors recommend that you save the joker alone. My calculations
show that you are almost always better off saving one
card with the joker. Apparently your increased chances
of four-of-a-kind or five-of-a-kind make this the better
play. But which card? I have not found any small set of
precise rules that can tell you. Roughly, the idea is
to save the card that, considering all the other cards
left in the deck, is most likely to participate in a flush,
or a straight without a king or an ace. Thus cards towards
the middle, like sevens, are favored, but saving a seven
would not be a good idea if you discarded another card
of the same suit (i.e., the flush is less likely) or if
you discarded a card close to it like a six (i.e., the
straight is less likely).
- Two-card royals
that do not have a king or an ace are at the bottom of
the heap. You only hold them if you have nothing else.
Jeff
Lotspiech
is a Research Staff Member in the computer science department at
the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. You can
visit his site for a great listing of the whereabouts of Good
Video Poker Machines.
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