Winning at Video Poker

Video poker is the ideal game to discuss strategies, because it is one of the few where you can actually use strategies to win a lot of money. The decisions that a player makes at a video poker game have a big impact on which hands he plays. Video poker is different from those games in which you roll the dice or just watch a ball on a wheel. The fact that the player's decisions makes up so much of whether he wins or loses can also be detrimental to that individual player.

To avoid this, a player can try to learn as much as possible about the game before deciding to play video poker for real money. A good start is to keep the strategies presented here at FantasyCasino.org in mind.

Video Poker Strategy
Many people assume that a game controlled by a machine is automatically unbeatable. This is not the case, because it the player that plays the cards right wins more often than he loses. For the really big wins, however, a player needs patience, as the big hands often only come about when you're ready to hit the biggest jackpot with a Royal Flush.

The Royal Flush is the biggest hand for the two most popular video poker machines, "Jacks or Better" and "Deuces Wild". While some players consider both types of video poker games the same way, we will focus here on how you can win at the two games in the long run. Let's start with the Jacks or Better machine.

In Jacks or Better, the minimum winning hand is a pair of jacks. Other lower pairs are meaningless. However, you can hold a lower pair and draw the rest of the hand to improve to three of a kind, a full house, or four of a kind.

The goal is always to get a royal flush, and to recognize what it takes to get it. Every time you have four cards to a royal flush in your hand, then you should throw out the card that does not fit. You may ask: "What do you do if you have a straight or flush in your hand?" The answer is to abandon the hand, for the largest jackpot will be won only with a royal flush. The only exception to this rule would be if you have a straight flush, because this combination provides too large a profit to throw away.

A player should also always play with the maximum amount of coins the machine allows to get the maximum payout. The same goes for the Deuces Wild machine that allows players to replace the card 2 ("deuce") with any other card that they need to make his hand. Players should always hold their deuces in a Deuces Wild game since they are the most valuable cards in this game.

One difference between Deuces Wild and Jacks or Better is that, in Deuces Wild, high pairs are worthless and the minimum winning hand is three of a kind. If you have two pairs and another Royal Flush suitable card, you should certainly go for the royal flush, since the 2 can be used for any other card. Getting a royal flush is in fact somewhat simpler in this version of the game because of deuces, but the player wins less overall by using the deuces to make a royal flush than he would with a "natural" royal flush.