Thehouse edgecan vary drastically depending on which video poker game you play, and how the paytable is structured.
Understanding how Video Poker Works
Video poker is based onfive card draw poker.
The principles of the game are the same for almost all the different variants you will find.
Stake your bet, and then you are dealt 5 cards.
You have to decide which of the cards you will hold and which you will discard.
After you have confirmed which cards you want to discard, these will be replaced with new cards.
The round ends, and if you have a winning hand, you are paid out your winnings.
Even if you haven’t played poker before, you may be familiar with the following.
They are listed from the weakest hand to the strongest.
These are all the basic poker hands, and virtually all video poker games will feature them.
Take Jacks or Better, arguably the most popular video poker game.
This significant difference comes from the slight difference in the odds for specific payouts.
You may have heard of Full Pay and Short Pay video poker games.
These have nothing to do with the variant or the rules.
Instead, they refer to which paytable the game uses.
We have covered these extensively in our Video Poker Paytables Guide.
There, you will see exactly which paytables pay best for all the different video poker games.
However, there are differences in the payouts on Full House hands and Flushes.
Jacks or Better 9/5 pays out 9x on the Full House and just 5x on the Flush.
The actual probability of you forming a winning hand is lower than what the payout’s implied probability is.
Let’s analyze thereal-life probabilitiesof winning hands in video poker.
That is, it will happen once in every 650,000 hands, hypothetically speaking of course.
How House Edges Comes Into Play
This takes us onto the house edge.
The odds themselves will show us the implied probability of each hand getting drawn.
Taking the discrepancy between the implied and the real probabilities, we get the house edge on each bet.
For this example, we will look at two Jacks or Better Paytables.
One is the Full Pay 9/6 game and the other is a 6/5 Short Pay game.
There are already big discrepancies in the implied probabilities for each hand.
Such as aiming for a Four of a Kind, Straight Flush or Royal Flush.
Luck is an integral part of these games, whether you use a strategy or not.
But by using a strategy, you’re able to reduce the house edge ever so slightly.
The odds on improving your hand may not be so far fetched but remember there are no guarantees.
In video poker, patience is an essential part of turning the game to work in your favor.
Daniel has been writing about casinos and sports betting since 2021.
