Maximize Your Winnings: Master the Art of Online Video Poker

The Basics of Online Video Poker

Most video poker titles in fancy new online casinos use a touchscreen, though older video poker machines have buttons that you push to interact. In video poker, you place a bet and you’re dealt five cards. Video poker machines follow traditional poker hand hierarchy, featuring a pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, and a top hand of a royal flush.

Video poker machines tend to have small bet maximums, like slot machines. Bet sizes in video poker range from nickel and quarter bets up to multi-hand high roller video poker machines that can play hundreds of dollars per round, but the majority of machines operate between a quarter and a few dollars per hand.

During gameplay, you can choose to discard or not discard from your hand to build a better hand. Video poker machines vary, so the winning combinations and payouts for each machine might be different. That information is displayed on a paytable on the machine’s face.

Online Video Poker Pay Tables

While all online poker sites feature Jacks or Better and Joker Poker (Joker’s Wild), the paytables on these online video poker games are not all the same. Here are factors to keep in mind while choosing online video poker games.

• The games at Roaring 21, Casino Max, and Sloto Cash offer a 250x payout for a royal flush instead of a 800x payout. 250x is the payout for a 4-coin jackpot at most Las Vegas Strip video poker machines, so this adds 1% or more to the house edge of the game.
• Some games, like Bonus Poker Deluxe, trade this disadvantage for the advantage of 75x payouts on a straight flush (instead of 50x payouts in many games). It’s not all to a player’s disadvantage.
• When you read online about the great odds video poker offers, these articles refer to full-pay video poker machines that are found in Las Vegas casinos.
• Responsible video poker experts post multiple paytables, but even the experts can’t cover every single version of a game.
• Long story short: an online video poker house edge might not be the same as what you’ve read about.
• In our experience, the video poker paytables at Bovada, Ignition, Slots.lv, and Cafe Casino are closer to what you’ll find in Las Vegas casinos than the other gaming sites on the list.

The table below points the way to the best RTPs for each video poker variant at online casinos in the United States we recommend.

1. Play free video poker online.

Free video poker games are common online. Most provide the option to play real money video poker. This helps you learn the rules of different video poker titles without risking real money. Don’t go into a casino and play video poker without any experience. Free video poker games are everywhere, so try your hand before you sit in front of the real deal.

2. Study a machine’s payout table.

If you don’t know what a video poker machine will pay for different hands, you don’t know whether or not it’s a good or bad video poker game. One rule of thumb, the more wild cards there are in a video poker title, the harder it is to get to the better casino payouts. You learn things like that by studying payout tables. The video poker games that offer you the best odds have no wild cards at all, and offer payouts starting at just a pair of Jacks or better. Some Deuces Wild games offer positive expectation if played with perfect strategy thanks to the payout table structure. As a counter-example, the popular Joker’s Wild video poker games has the lowest payout on two pair or better, so it is harder to win on Joker’s Wild than a wild card-less video poker game.

3. Bet maximum.

Everyone’s video poker strategy is a little different, but most video poker players agree that maximum bets are always the best play.

There’s an entire type of online video poker real money machines, called a progressive video poker machine, that only pays out the highest jackpots to maximum bets. These machines have different schedules for maximum bets than lower bets, so you’d want to bet the highest amount possible when playing those machines. The trick is knowing how to read a payout schedule and figure out if it is worthwhile to bet max, or if you can save a little of your bankroll with smaller bets.

Now that you know the basics of video poker, follow these three simple tips and you should be able to have some good cheap entertainment at your local video poker game. Look for the best payout schedules and remember that video poker offers some of the better odds of any game on the casino floor.

4. Play Online Video Poker Wisely

Keeping in mind what we said about online video poker paytables in the table above, choose your online casino for video poker wisely. The list of recommended video poker casinos below places the sites with the most video poker games at the top of the list. At present, the video poker games with the best odds are at the sites towards the bottom of the list.