Video poker is an automated casino game that has some of the most passionate fans in the gambling community. It does not have the colorful graphics and fun music from Slots, nor does it have the glamor of classics such as roulette or craps.
However, it attracts many beginners and experienced players because of its relative simplicity and the sensation of poker. It offers a potential return of more than 99%. It is easy to play and at the same time it is a challenging and exciting game.
The origin of video poker
In the 70s, when video poker first appeared, it was played on machines, similar to Slots. Video poker looked like a large television and looked rather primitive.
But the poker remained fundamentally - it followed the same rules and the required certain knowledge and skills to win. In the following decades it grew in popularity and players in Las Vegas developed strategies that helped them to score more constant profits.
With the arrival of online casinos, it became available for all types of players and even for those who had never set foot in a casino. The virtual nature made the transition to online video poker flexible and of course. Game developers started making different variations on the basic game to keep the players interested.
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Nowadays
Nowadays there are hundreds of video poker games that can be played online. They prefer an increasing number of casino visitors because they are easy to play. Unlike live pokerspellen, players do not feel intimidated and stressed.
With video poker you do not play against a dealer or against other gamblers but against a computer. You can determine the pace of the game. With your promotions you can effectively influence the outcome of the game.
In fact, video poker is the electronic casino game that has the lowest house advantage. This means that you have the option of recovering a large part of your entire bet in the long term.
How does video poker work?
Based on a simple form of poker, 5-card draw poker to be precise, video poker is played with a single card game of 52 cards. The lowest paying hand is a few farmers, called Jacks or Better. This became the name of the most basic video poker variant.
Instead of the cards shared by a croupier such as with Poker, the player receives 5 random cards from a computer here. Although the game is indeed simple and easy to play, you can considerably increase your chances of winning. For this you must know the basic rules and the nature of this automated game well.
Rules and basic principles
Video poker, also called Draw Poker, is a game where the player receives 5 cards from a card game of 52 cards (from 2 to bait). These can be replaced or held, so that they can form a winning hand.
To start a video patch game, you must first place a bet. With most games you can choose from 1 to 5 coins in the amount of money you have used - from $ 0.05 to $ 5. As soon as you press the deal / draw button, you will receive 5 cards that you can hold or replace. You must select all cards that you want to keep - one or all cards.
The goal is to collect cards that form a winning hand, so choose your cards well. Then you have to press the deal button again and the cards that you have decided to throw away will be replaced by new ones.
Usually the game immediately indicates whether or not your hand wins something. The payout depends on the specific combination of cards that you have collected - how strong the hand is and the size of your bet.
With video poker, playing with the maximum number of coins is a good strategy because the payment for a Royal Flush is much greater than the money that is given for, for example, a bet of 1 currency.
The Royal Flush is the best paying hand in the game, but it is not an easy task. That is why all new players must learn what the winning hands are with video poker and how they are arranged.
Winning hands
Since video poker is derived from classic poker, the winning hands here are very similar to those you may already know from Table Poker. There is some deviation from the traditional rules and it is individual for each specific variant of video poker. However, the rules and manual ranking in the game Jacks or Better are considered fundamentally and form the basis for almost all other versions.
In the regular Jacks or Better the strongest hand is called Royal Flush and it is a combination of a ten, a farmer, a woman, a gentleman and a bait of the same kind. It provides the highest payout and is the least likely.
The next best hand is Straight Flush, which is formed by five consecutive cards of the same series. In other words, a Royal Flush is simply the strongest Straight Flush. This hand is followed by Four of A Kind, and that is exactly what it sounds: four cards with the same value.
The next best hand in the ranking is called Full House and consists of a few and a triple, for example a few nines and three five. It is followed by a map combination that is known as Flush, or five cards of the same series that may be in any order.
After the flush comes the straight and is formed by five consecutive cards of each species. The lowest winning hands are Three of A Kind, Two Pairs and Two or A Kind. With most video cooker varieties, the weakest hand is a few farmers or cards with a higher picture, but sometimes a few tens are also considered winning.
Another thing that you have to remember is that the lowest hand, the Jacks or Better, is paid evenly. The player receives a profit that is equal to the deployment that has been placed for this round.
Wild cards
A joker is a playing card that can replace any other card of the card game and is usually used in poker games. For example, if you have two kings, two fives and a joker, the joker can stand for a king. In this case you get a full house instead of Two Pairs, which means that you win much more with the help of the Wildcard.
This special card is used in some games because forming winning hands makes it much easier and adds a surprise element.
Although Jokers usually get a wild status, other cards can also serve as Wilds in video poker. For example, one of the most popular variants uses all four two as Yoker signs. The two are called Deunces and the name of the game is the wild.
Another popular video poker version is Joker Poker, where one joker is added to the card game and is used as wild. At Double Joker Poker you have two jokers, or in other words, two wilds.
Usually video poker games with jokers offer no payouts for the Jacks or Better and Two Pair hands. The reason for this is the greater chance of putting together a winning set of cards if you have Wilds. These games make the difference well by eliminating the two lowest hands.
Another aspect of video poker games with wild cards is that they have two types of Royal Flush: a Natural Royal Flush and a Wild Royal Flush. The difference between the two is easy to guess - the Wild Royal Flush is formed with a joker. In such games, the Natural Royal Flush is always the strongest and best paying hand.
random number generator
To be able to play video poker accurately and to maximize the chances of winning, players must understand the functioning of this game. There are quite a few myths in connection with video poker and with electronic casino games as a whole.
One is that these machines or virtual games are pre -programmed to pay jackpots once every six months or once every 100,000 laps. There is also no automatic shaking of the cards with video poker people think. These misconceptions not only confuse the players, they also lead to making the wrong decisions while playing.
The truth is that all virtual casino games are dictated by a Random Number Generator technology. This is a powerful microprocessor that constantly generates long number series with the help of complex calculation algorithms. These numbers are random and they determine which card is shared and in which position on the screen.
These random number generators, or RNGs, are extremely complicated, safe and almost impossible to manipulate. For this reason they have hundreds of applications in all kinds of activities and industries that require the creation of random, unpredictable results.
The RNG technology is not only used in the development of video poker and gambling games, but also in computer simulations and cryptography.
The practical aspect of video poker games powered by RNG is that the chance of getting a certain hand is always the same. The cards that you get with every draw are randomly chosen and you can, for example, win the jackpot twice in a row - although this is highly unlikely.
It is also possible to play Jacks or Better for weeks without ever having a Royal Flush. Or you can get a high paying hand the first time you play the game.
Payment table
One of the most important things that players have to take into account before they Real money On a video poker game, the payment table is. This is a graph with all possible winning hands and their respective payouts. Payout tables vary from one video poker variant to the other, but they are all more or less based on the payment table of the Jacks Or Better game.
The lowest paying hand, usually a few farmers, is paid evenly, which means that its profit is the same as the deployment. The payout for the second best hand, Two Pair, is twice as large as the bet, while it is 3 and 4 times the size of the deployment for Three of A Kind and for Straight respectively.
The payments for the next two hands are very important and players must always check this in advance, because it indicates whether that specific game variation is good or not. When the flush 6 times the size of the deployment and the full house -is paid out 9 times, the game is called a "full -pay" game.
These variations are also known as 9/6 games, which means that the return they offer is probably high. However, a large part of the video cooking variations pays less for these hands, so beginners should try to only play well -paid games.
In the standard Jacks or Better payment table, the payments for Four of A Kind and Straight Flush are 25 and 50 times the size of your bet, while for a Royal Flush you receive a profit that is equal to 250 times your bet.
However, the Royal Flush payment increases dramatically if you play with 5 coins, or the maximum number of coins offered by the game-instead of 1250 times the size of your bet, it jumps to 4000 times the size of the deployment. It is therefore recommended to always play the maximum bet, especially if you are aiming for the jackpot.
The expected return
The expected return is the average theoretical return of placed bets in each game, or what percentage of your bets You can expect to recover in the long term. This return is usually displayed as a percentage and online casinos call it return to player or RTP.
For example, if you bet $ 100 on a game with an RTP of 95%, you can expect that you will eventually win $ 95. The return percentage is a valuable piece of information because it shows whether you can regularly generate income by playing a certain video cook variant.
The expected return depends on the payment table and the ability of the player to use the correct strategy when playing a game. For example, a regular Jacks or Better game with full payment has a reimbursement rate of 99.54%, which means that the house benefit is almost insignificant with 0.46%.
Yet this is the average potential return of the game, which means that to achieve this you have to apply a perfect strategy with as few errors as possible and have to play a large number of rounds.
Even video cooker variants with a low fee usually have high RTPs, so they still have much less house edge than most casino games. The return of Blackjack is usually around 99.5%, while the percentage for slot machines varies from 80% for physical casinos to 98% for online slot machines.
Interestingly, bingo games and different lotteries usually have an average return of less than 50% and although they are statistically the worst gambling options, millions of people play them regularly.
Single Hand and MultiHand Video Poker
With classic video poker, players focus on a single hand that is shared by the computer, but variations with multiple hands have become very popular in recent years. They enable you to play 5, 10 or a maximum of 100 hands at the same time, which speculates the game and makes it much more exciting.
When you start the game, choose the cards you want to hold and press the deal / draw button-just like with normal video poker. But instead of receiving a single set of new cards, you will see several hands where the cards you hold the original positions remain.
These variations with multiple hands give you the opportunity to win multiple hands at the same time. However, the deployment that you place is multiplied by the number of hands you play, so you have to use much more every round.
For example, if you play with 1 coin in a game with 100 hands, the bet per round is 100 coins. This is why video poker with multiple hands is not recommended for starting or budget players - they can lose large amounts of money within a few minutes, even with a perfect strategy.
FAQ
Video poker is not as popular as slots, but all the major developers of casino software have made their own versions of the game. Some game studios are aimed at offering players variety, others are committed to offer them only high -quality games with beautiful graphics and many bonuses.
While there was only one video poker variant a few decades ago, there are now hundreds. Each of them has a separate payment table, although some software developers allow casinos and gambling operators to adjust the payments individually.
They are there. Look at our strategy articles about Video Poker.
This is mainly about securing the wrong combinations. You have two farmers but also 4 tickets for a Royal Flush. Of course you better throw a farmer away.
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