All About Video Poker
By Randy Ray, Sat Dec 10th
a href="http://www.videopokerhero.com/">Video poker is acasino game that has much in common with slot machines, but itis a slot machine game combined with the rules of five card drawpoker in a very specific manner. Video is often consideredby many experienced gamblers to be vastly superior to slotmachines because of the effect that skilled play has on thepotential payback of the machine. While slot machines areprogrammed to pay back a certain percentage of the money that isfed into the machine, video pays back a percentage thatcan be affected by perfect strategic play. Video games first appeared in the 1970's, but didn't startenjoying widespread popularity until the 1980's, when slotmachine manufacturer IGT became involved in the production ofvideo games. Many people in casinos who are nervous orintimidated by table games find video to be a lot more"friendly" than blackjack or live poker. This is probablybecause video combines the strategic thinking of a tablegame like blackjack with the solitary playing experience of aslot machine. Video games are easily played. The player wages 1 or morecoins in order to get dealt five virtual cards on a computerscreen. (A smart player always plays the max bet, usually 5coins, since the max bet triggers the bigger payoffs on thehigher ranked hands.) The player chooses which cards to hold andthen draws cards to replace his discarded cards. The final handpays out based on the payout table for the particular video game.
Popular video games include deuces wild and jacks or better, both of which are often played either assingle hands or in a multi-hand version, where the player getsto play 3, 5, 10, 50 or even 100 hands of video at thesame time. Depending on the payout schedule for the different handson a certain machine, the payback percentage on a video pokercan be very good indeed. Jacks or better with a "full pay", orthe highest standard payback schedule, pays back at 99.5% withperfect play. A full pay deuces wild machine pays back at 100.7%with perfect play. In actual practice, players who don't playperfectly and make mistakes reduce the practical paybackpercentage on those machines by 6% or more, making video pokerone of the most profitable games in the casino, especially sincemany video players play upwards of 500 hands per hour. Learning how to play video poker with perfect strategy is not terriblyhard to do. There are numerous video strategy guidesavailable
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for sale, and Bob Dancer's excellent tutorials andsoftware teach video strategy through a series of bothcharts and lists of principles that will work effectively fordifferent learning styles. Practicing has become much easier also, now that freevideo poker games have become so prevalent online. Gameslike these allow you to play online with no download and nocost, and they're played using the same rules as the video pokergames found in traditional land-based casinos. About the author:The author has been playing video poker for years,and he still isn't tired of it. | 
