Section: Advice > Gaming Tips

Strategies for Video Poker
by Jeffrey Lotspiech

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Variations of Video Poker Machines

Jacks-or-Better Machines
The original video poker machines were the venerable jacks-or-better machines. Since their introduction, there has been an explosion of other types. But the jacks-or-better are still popular. We will start with them. The full payout for a jacks-or-better machine, with five coins in, is:

Overview of the Player's Strategy

In this section, and in the similar sections that follow for each type of machine, I will discuss the highlights of the proper strategy for the machine. I will concentrate on those discards that differ from normal table poker. The complete strategy is given in the Jacks-or-Better Expert Strategy Sheet. I take that sheet with me when I play in the casino, and even after many years, I still have to refer to it occasionally for the close hands. But for those of you that like a less terse (and less detailed) description, here are some key points:

1. Always go for a royal flush if you have four of the cards you need: break up a pat flush or straight, and certainly a pair of jacks-or-better, if you have to.

2. Break up a pair of jacks-or-better to draw one card to a straight flush, but in general hold such a pair instead of a three-card royal flush: the only exceptions are the two best three-card royals: KQJ and QJT.

3. If you have a choice between drawing one card to a flush or two cards to a royal flush, go for the royal flush.

4. A pair of jacks-or-better is better than a four-card flush, but a four-card flush (or three-card royal flush) is better than a lower pair. Such a lower pair is in turn better than a four-card straight (except for the KQJT straight), and better than all the other hands we discuss below.

5. A three-card straight flush with no gaps is better than any two-card royal flush, but as you start to add gaps, things deteriorate rapidly. With one gap, a two-card royal flush is superior as long as it does not have a ten. And if your three-card straight flush has two gaps, you almost always ignore it; you only save it if you have absolutely nothing else to save in your hand.

6. If you have three high cards of different suits, you save all three only if they are the KQJ. Otherwise you discard the Ace.

7. Two-card royal flushes with tens vary a lot. A JT is a pretty good hand, but an AT is never saved. A QT royal flush is saved as long as you do not have a jack, but a KT is saved only if you have no other high cards.

Now would be as good a time as any to discuss how to count gaps in three-card straight flushes. These hands are a bit of a dilemma, because the standard terminology of poker no longer suffices to describe the possibilities. In the table game, where the only interesting hand is a four-card straight, you have inside straights and outside straights. When you only hold three cards, there are two types of "inside" straights, and almost all video poker books use the ugly term double inside to distinguish them. Not here. I prefer to distinguish straights by the number of gaps in the cards you hold. For example, holding a 6-7-8 you have no gaps, whereas holding 6-7-9 (or 6-8-9) you have one gap, and 6-7-10 (or 6-8-10 or 6-9-10) you have two gaps.

I think the term gap is more evocative. Gaps are bad. (In contrast, you have to think twice about inside and outside. Is it better to be inside or outside? It is warmer inside. But I digress...) After all is said and done, though, the telling characteristic is the number of possible straights you could make with the cards you hold. A 6-7-8 can make three different straights (8 high, 9 high, and 10 high); add one gap and only two straights can be made; with two gaps only one straight can be made. If your mental model is that a zero-gap three-card straight flush is three times better than a two-gap one, you would not be far wrong. This brings up the only trickiness in using the gap method for evaluating straights: if you are near one end or the other of the card ranks, you have to count extra gaps. For example, an A-2-3 is equivalent to a two-gap three-card straight flush because it can only make one possible straight. If you find this confusing, you can probably ignore this subtlety without affecting your bottom line more than 1/10th of a per cent.

By a serendipitous chance, having a high card in a three-card straight flush almost exactly cancels out the disadvantage of a gap, because it greatly increases your chance of ending up with a high-card pair. Of course, this is only important in games like jacks-or-better where high pairs pay. Thus, in these games, when counting your gaps, you should subtract one for every high card in the three-card straight flush. For example, a J-9-8 should be figured as a zero gap hand, the jack cancelling the 10 gap. This greatly reduces the number of hands that need to be listed in the tables. It also explains the one rule-of-thumb that is true no matter what variation of machine you are playing: when faced with a choice of a two-card royal flush or a three-card straight flush which contains the two royal flush cards, it is always better to save the three cards.

In the wild card machines, you should ignore wild cards for the purposes of counting gaps. For example, a Joker-6-7-9 would be a four-card straight with one gap. In a game where deuces are wild, assume any straight with a deuce simply does not exist. For example, 3-4-5 should be counted as having two gaps, not zero as it would be in any other machine. The reason is that a middle straight can be satisfied both by the missing straight cards and by deuces. However, when a missing straight card is also the deuce, you do not want to count your chances twice. Ignoring them entirely is also not precisely correct, but is a good first-order approximation.

Common Variations of Jacks-or-Better

One beneficial variation is for the casino to raise the payoff for the royal flush from 4000 to 4700 coins. (Why such an odd number, you ask? That makes the jackpot just below the threshold for which the casino would have to file a W2G on you with the IRS. Neither you nor the casino wants that.) This raises the expected return of the game to a very nice 99.9%.

By the way, it is relatively easy to get a quick estimate of what a pay table variation will do to the net return of a game. Start with the payout table given above. Working out the 4700 royal flush example, you can notice that royal flushes account for 1.98% of the total return when the payout is 4000. Thus, when the payout is 4700, they should roughly contribute (4700/4000 * 1.98%) or 2.33%. ("Roughly" because in this case you can adjust your playing strategy slightly to pick up 1/100th(!) of a percent.) Thus this machine should pay at least 0.35% more than the standard machine -- and it does.

On the other hand, the common "greedy casino" jacks-or-better variation is to change the payout of a full house to 40 and a flush to 25. These machines are called "5/8" machines as opposed to "6/9" machines; the names come from the flush/full house payoff for a single coin. 5/8 machines give 2% or more back to the casino and should be avoided.

Some 5/8 machines will offer a progressive jackpot on the royal flush, one that starts at 4000 but then increases slowly until some player hits it. While it is true that if the jackpot gets high enough it can offset the disadvantage of a 5/8 payoff, I avoid progressive machines as a matter of personal taste. Saying that a progressive is occasionally in your favor is like saying that the state lottery is occasionally in your favor; it is true, but it requires you to actually hit the big payoff to realize the advantage. Also, my strategy was calculated for the 6/9 payoff, so your return will be off by a fraction of a percent from the optimal return if you use it on these games.

A relatively new gimmick used on 5/8 machines to make them more attractive is "bonus poker"--offering higher payoffs for certain fours-of-a-kind. It seems to be working; these machines are popular. Avoid them. The "bonus" only slightly compensates for the big disadvantage of the 5/8. On the other hand, "double bonus" poker is a good machine; its return is 100.17%, if you can find the full payout version.

A rare variation of jacks-or-better is tens-or-better. These machines pay on a pair of tens as well. These are actually "5/6" machines, as the payoff for a flush is 25 and for a full house is 30. Nonetheless, he average return for optimal play is almost exactly the same as the jacks-or-better machines. Yet it seems casinos steer away from them, and the few that offer them are exceedingly proud of it. I suspect that the problem with tens-or-better, from the casinos' point of view, is that it is less susceptible to bad play than other machines. Even people who have no idea what they are doing can apparently get a reasonable return on these machines. Anyway, from your point of view as an expert player, tens-or-better is neither better nor worse than jacks-or-better and can be played when you are looking for a change of pace.

However, tens-or-better has a lower variance than jacks-or-better. Variance is a mathematical quantity with an important practical consequence. A high variance game will be much more "streaky" than a low variance game. You will find yourself alternately plummeting, then being treated to a flurry of wins that put you back up ahead (we hope). This streakiness is a quality of a gambling game that some people like and others do not. If you like playing a high variance game, bring more money. For example, if I am playing jacks-or-better, I figure that $100 stake should last for as long a session as I am comfortable playing (which for me is three hours), even if I am relatively unlucky. If I am playing jokers wild (the highest variance), $200 seems to be the equivalent stake. And this is true even though the return on jokers wild is better than jacks-or-better.

Sometimes you will find machines that pay only 5 for two pair instead of the normal 10. This is a complete rip-off, and should be avoided at all costs. Two pair account for 25% of your total return, and cutting that in half gives an enormous 12% extra to the house, an amount that cannot be compensated for by increases to the payoffs of the rarer hands.

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.

All information presented on this site is copyright to it's original author. Please do not reproduce any content without permission.
If you have questions or comments about the site, please Contact Me