More and more of you are leaving the slots and coming over to Video Poker, as evidenced by the increasing amounts of mail that I'm receiving with basic questions about the game. This is a good time for me to pause in my lessons which have gotten somewhat advanced in order to bring the newcomers up to date.

Video Poker versus Slots

The basic appeal of Video Poker is that you, the player, can tell a good machine from a bad machine at a glance. By 'good', I mean a machine that will, in the long run, pay back more of the $$$ you put in as compared with another machine. You can't do that with a slot machine; there's no way of knowing which is good and which is bad until after you've played it. In any event, there are few slots which offer a long-term return of over 100%, but there are a lot of VP machines that do. Now that may not make a lot of sense to you, why would a casino ever put in any machine which has the potential to return over 100%? The reason is that those machines return over 100% only if they are played properly and most players don't know how to do that. Just like Blackjack, which also has the potential of a 100+% return, the casinos make $$$ on these machines through players' mistakes in strategy.

Video Poker machines are not set 'internally' (in the computer chip) to give a specific return like a slot; the return is determined by the pay schedule and by how the player deals with that pay schedule. That leads us to all those notations you see regarding Video Poker machines like 9/6, 10/7, etc. The pay schedule shown on the front of the machine is what determines the payout and those notations are our 'shorthand' for describing the machine. For example, if a game has the following pay schedule (based on 5 coins played):

then this is what we call a "9/6 Jacks or Better" game. You can see (by dividing the payout by 5) that the Full House pays 9 for 1 and the Flush pays 6 for 1, thus, it's a 9/6 game. We know through computer-generated analysis that such a game, if played properly, has a long term return of 99.54%. Obviously that's not a 100% return, but several other factors which I'll explain in later lessons can make such a game worth playing. Now if you see a similar game, but the Full House pays only 40 (8 for 1) and the Flush pays 25 ( 5 for 1), then you're looking at an "8/5 Jacks" game and that has a long-term return of only 97.3%. Remember that all other parts of the pay schedule have remained the same, so we're comparing apples to apples.

You might run across a machine where the Full House pays 45 and the Flush pays 35 and think you've found some super-pay Jacks game, but you need to look at the rest of the schedule. If it looks like this: