I've received a lot of e-mail about video poker and the vast majority of it concerns what could best be described as 'beginner's questions', so I thought I'd do a series on how to get started in video poker -- the smart way. This will, for a while, replace the 'Video Poker Review' which I was doing. In that series, I showed you the proper way to play different video poker hands and that might have been just a bit too advanced for many of you. We'll get back to that after I've gone through a comprehensive explanation of why video poker is a much better choice to play in a casino than the slots.

My goal here is to at least get you off the slots and, if you still want to play the 'mechanical' games (as opposed to the 'table' games), you'll be a lot more knowledgeable about where your best bet is. Slots provide a huge amount of income to the casino industry, primarily because they are easy to play. Video poker is not as easy to play as most slots, but they aren't rocket science either, so I hope if you're currently a slot player, you'll at least give this a shot.

The nice thing about video poker machines is that you can tell, before sitting down at one, whether or not it's a 'good' machine or a 'bad' machine. Can you do that with a slot machine? No. But each video poker machine has a pay schedule on it that enables us to determine what kind of return a player can expect from that machine. There are a few catches here, however, which I'll explain. First, any implied payback of a video poker machine assumes that the machine always deals from a random deck of 52 cards and that there are no internal controls which limit payoffs. I know that the machines in Nevada and New Jersey must be completely random and I know by experience that the machines I've played in Missouri and Illinois are also random. That's good. Second, the implied return will only happen over a long period of time. Just because you can, from a mathematics point of view, expect to hit a Full House once every 90 hands (as an example), it does NOT mean you'll hit one on the 90th hand, the 180th hand, etc. All you can safely say is that, after a 'trial' of say, 100,000 hands, the number of Full Houses you've received will average out at one every 90 hands. Got that? Good. Now, all of this assumes that you play each hand correctly. In other words, if you do not play the hands in the optimum way, you cannot expect to experience the implied payback which the machine offers. I think you know what I mean. If you're in the habit of breaking up Full Houses (3-of-a-kind plus a pair) by discarding the pair in order to draw to the 3K in the hopes of hitting 4-of-a-kind, you'll increase the number of 4-of-a-kinds, but you'll actually make less money in the long run because you're giving up the Full House return. With me on that one?

Video poker has an advantage which slots don't have and that's predictability. If a machine uses 52 cards which are dealt at random, it's relatively easy for a computer to figure out just how often you'll get any particular hand. For example, if you are dealt 5 cards, there are a total of 2,598,960 different hands which you can receive. Of those hands, 4 are Royal Flushes (10, J, Q, K, A of the same suit), so the odds of receiving a Royal Flush in your first 5 cards is 2,598,960 divided by 4 or once in every 649,740 hands. That's a lot of hands, so don't hold your breath waiting to be dealt one. BUT, in video poker you may hold some cards and discard others, so the chance of a Royal Flush is greatly improved because you get another shot at it. It's almost as easy to figure how often you can expect to get a Royal, since we know all the possible hands you can get which may contain one or more cards of a Royal and we can figure what the possibilities are of drawing the needed cards to make the hand. Thus, while it depends upon the game, we know that a Royal will occur, on average, about once every 40,000 hands. We can figure ALL possible hands this way, and then add it all up to figure just how much payback a machine will give -- in the long run -- based on the pay schedule. By 'payback', I mean that a particular pay schedule can be calculated to offer a 98% payback. That means that if you play the machine (or others just like it) for a long time, it will turn out that you've lost about 2% of all you've put in it. For example, if you play a 25-cent machine which requires 5 coins, you're betting $1.25 per hand and if you play at a rate of 400 hands an hour (very possible), you're betting $1.25 times 400 = $500 an hour at that machine. Don't panic here; you may well have only $10 in quarters in the machine, but because you're hitting 'little' hands like pairs or two pair, etc., you're recirculating your $$$ over and over. Back to the example. If the implied payback is 98%, you can expect to lose -- in the long run -- about 2% of all the $$$ you bet. So, if you play 40,000 hands at $1.25 a pop, you'll have bet $50,000 over that period of time. Two percent of $50,000 is $1000 and that's the amount you'd expect to be down. So, we can see that playing video poker machines with just a 98% payback is not a good deal. But, what would the result be if you played 25-cent slots where the average payback is 92 percent? Your expected loss would be about $4000!! Do you honestly know anybody who has played 25-cent slots for 1000 hours and walked away a winner? I don't, but I do know a lot of video poker players who've played for years and they're still winning.

So, how does a player figure which is the best machine to play? First, you must gather some information. You have to write down what the machine pays for the various hands. You then need some sort of reference book where the payback has been figured out for you, or one which will help you figure it out yourself. I think every video poker player ought to own Lenny Frome's book "Winning Strategies for Video Poker" and Dan Paymar's book "Video Poker - Precision Play". Both of these guys have web sites which you can access through our links and you should check them out. Most of the major games in the casino today are covered in their books, but if you run accross a machine which isn't in there, e-mail me and I'll get an answer for you.