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Many of you have read my column when I talk about how video poker strategy is nothing like regular 5-card draw poker strategy at a poker game. This is absolutely true.
A video poker machine has one correct mathematical strategy for every one of the initial 5-card hands. This is because everything is known except for one thing – which cards you will draw. We know the exact payout you will get for any given final hand. We know the probability of winning. We even know the probability of winning with each given hand.
In table poker, there are so many other moving parts. First of all, you are not playing against a pay table. Having a Pair of Jacks does not make you an instant winner. Then you have the variables of how many other players are still in, who those players are and the style of play they use (do they ever bluff?), how big the pot is (i.e. how much will you win), etc.
Plus you may even know how many cards the other players have already drawn. If a player draws two cards, does he have a 3-card Straight Flush, three High Cards or perhaps Trips? If three players draw before you and each draws one card, they might all be pulling for Straights or Flushes or maybe one has Two Pair.
This may greatly change your thoughts on what to do if you have a Pair of Jacks and a 4-card Flush. The odds of one of those players pulling a Straight or a Flush is moderate. Even if your Pair turns into Two Pair or Trips, it may not be enough, so maybe you go for the Flush? Maybe this decision hinges on the High Card of your Flush. There is no absolute here because there are so many unknowns.
Expert Strategy for a Jacks or Better machine is exactly what it is because we know the pay table. In video poker, you will never compete against multiple players and do not have to worry about winning a hand over another hand. About the only thing that changes is the payout of hands.
Last week, I discussed an alternate strategy one could employ to trigger Royal Flushes to occur more frequently. This hurts our payback but increases the probability of hitting a Royal. But, if a Royal paid more than it currently does, as it might in a Progressive, this strategy could become optimal and result in an increase in both payback and frequency of the Royal.
In reality, what our strategy actually does is determine the frequency of each hand. If a Royal is worth more than 800 units, it may be worth it for us to give up a certain number of Pairs in order to get an additional number of Royals.
Years ago, there was a version of video poker called “Flush Attack.” After every X number of Flushes, it would go into “Flush Attack Mode” in which a Flush paid considerably more than normal for one Flush. It would pay 25 instead of the normal 6. If you played during this mode, your strategy was completely turned on its head.
You would play any 4-card Flush, even over a Pair of Aces! The goal was to hit this Flush as fast as possible. Adding to the fun was that many of these Flush Attack machines were linked in a bank of games. First machine to get the Flush would turn off the Flush Attack mode for the entire bank.
So, the player who could increase his frequency to get a Flush would have an advantage over the other players. Normally, a Flush occurs about 1 in 90 hands when playing using Expert Strategy. Modify this strategy in Flush Attack mode and you could increase this to 1 in 42. In other words, you could more than double the frequency of a Flush simply by altering your strategy.
This is done solely because the Flush pays 25 instead of 6, which makes it the right play. For video poker, holding a 4-card Flush over a High Pair is the right play if the Flush pays 25 (and the other pays are ‘normal’) but you hold a High Pair over a 4-card Flush if the Flush pays only 6. I haven’t bothered to analyze at exactly what point the strategy switches – in case anyone is wondering.
So, that brings us back to the real world environment of table poker. When should you hold a High Pair over a 4-card Flush and vice versa? Could there really be only one answer? There isn’t even really one answer for video poker – as it depends on the paytable.
As you add more variables to the mix, the answer only gets even more complex.
The bottom line is there is the no one-size-fits-all answer for the proper way to draw a 5-card poker hand. Video poker provides the closest answer that can be given, but it is still always dependent on the specific pay table.

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Earn entries to Spin & Win for cash every Saturday through Feb. 23 at the Plaza and Las Vegas Club. Every 100 points earns 1 entry and 10 winners are selected to receive up to $1,000 cash every Saturday at 8:15 p.m. There is a “Bonus Spin” for all $100 and up winners. Visit the Player’s Club booth(s) for complete details.
El Cortez
Throughout January, Club Cortez players winning a jackpot of $200 or more on a slot machine, a $200 or more jackpot on a video poker five-cent or lower denomination machine, a $300 or more jackpot on a video poker 10-cent or high denomination machine or a $200 or more jackpot on live keno will be eligible to draw between $10-1000 in freeplay.
All jackpot winners will also receive an entry into the weekly Saturday night 50" LCD HDTV giveaway and $2,000 cash prize drawing. See Club Cortez for additional information and to redeem tickets.
Venetian/Palazzo
Da Vinci – The Genius at Imagine Exhibitions Gallery at The Venetian is available to children 12 and under free when accompanied by a paying adult. The exhibit features the most comprehensive exploration of Leonardo da Vinci’s works ever created. Last day for showing is Jan. 26.
The exhibition has 13 themed areas, featuring over 200 pieces. The exhibition also offers older students with a valid school ID a special discounted price of $17.
At the sister properties a “Spin & Win” promotion is running now through Jan. 31. Earn 500 Grazie Points each day to redeem your free spin at The Venetian Grazie desk. Spin 3 Grazie logos and win up to $1,000 in slot credits. Complete details are available at the club booth.
Eldorado/Joker’s Wild
Mondays in January are Customer Appreciation Days at both Henderson locations. Earn 3x points all day. Customers who earn 300 base points receive a food voucher valid for free select menu items. The Café inside both casinos is offering a spaghetti dinner special this month for $2.99 from 11 a.m. to close. The dinner also includes a choice of soup or salad.
Fiesta Rancho will host a kiddies’ freebie! In honor of National Skating Month (January), the team at SoBe Ice Arena is encouraging guests of all ages to get on the ice with free skate rentals and group lessons for skaters of all ability levels on January 28. Ages 3 and up are encouraged to participate, and games and prizes will be awarded to participants. The free group lesson will be held during the regularly scheduled public skate from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. and reservations are not necessary.
Stratosphere
Earn 50 base points and receive one free ticket to Pole Day at the Las Vegas Speedway coming up on Friday, March 8. Keep your earned points. There is a maximum of four tickets per person per day while supplies last
Until next week…good fun, good gaming and good luck!

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I recently had a conversation with a friend who was visiting Las Vegas. She likes to play video poker and had read the books I had given her. But, she said, most of what was in the book just went over her head.
So, we spent some time chatting about how video poker strategy is developed and why you play certain hands the way you do. I’m not sure if even after we were done, she fully understood everything, but part of my point to her was that she doesn’t have to.
There is no requirement that you understand how an expected value is calculated nor do you need to memorize specific expected values. What needs to be learned to learn the strategy is the order of the strategy table.
There’s an old joke that goes something like this – If you tell people that an all-powerful being created the universe, most will believe you. If you tell them not to touch something because it has been recently painted, most will touch the object because they don’t believe you.
This sort of explains the need to explain how expert strategy was created. You’re welcome to simply believe it, but I’m guessing the majority of the people reading this column are going to still want further proof than to simply take my word for it. In the case of my friend, she might be willing to go with the trust me method, but I’ve known her for nearly two decades.
Ironically, it is frequently easier to explain something with the use of pen and paper as opposed to a conversation around a dinner table. Unless someone is very quick with numbers, they’d rather see the details spelled out in black and white.
One of the quick examples that I gave to her was the case of the four-card flush and the low pair and the four-card straight and the low pair. Her first reaction was to keep the low pair in both situations. I explained how the situations are radically different.
In the case of the four-card flush, there are nine ways to make the flush which pays six, for a total of 54. In the case of the four-card straight, there are only eight ways to make the straight and they pay only four each for a total of 32. This 22 unit difference amounts to nearly 0.5 unit difference in expected value, which is a rather large gap.
Of course, you’re never really comparing a four-card straight to a four-card flush. Rather, you’re comparing each to a low pair. The low pair sits between the two, albeit much closer to the straight than the flush.
This large gap was the segue into the second part of our conversation. Not all mistakes are created equal. If you routinely play a low pair over a four-card flush, you’ll be costing yourself about 40 cents for every dollar wagered. This is not small. This is not even medium. This is disastrous! You turn a net winner into a net loser.
When you consider that about 25% of all four-card flushes are also a pair and that about 2/3 of these will be a low pair, we are talking about a very common hand. More than 3% of our hands are four-card flushes. All in all, we are talking about roughly 0.5% of our total hands. This may sound insignificant, but it simply isn’t.
You’ll get three or four of these an hour, and if you play them wrong, you’ll cost yourself $1.50-$2 per hour if you are a max-coin quarter player. Over time, this will add up to significant dollars.
On the other side of things, if you were to routinely play a four-card straight over a low pair, the gap there is only about 0.1 or one quarter of that of the flush/low pair situation. You still don’t want to be making this mistake often, but it will cost you only 35 -50 cents per hour.
The point I was making to my friend was that if even clearing up this one mistake in your strategy can greatly increase your payback. Yes, expert strategy payback is calculated based on perfect play, but we are all human and prone to errors. If you make an occasional mistake because you misread a hand, it will cost you, but an error rate of 1 in 1,000 will be unlikely to cost you much.
If you are making a repetitive mistake because you didn’t learn the entire strategy table, it will depend on which parts you didn’t learn. I, obviously, suggest you learn the entire table.
If dealt an off-suit JKA and choose to keep all three instead of just the JK, the cost to your bankroll will be far less than misplaying four-card flushes. The hand is rarer and the difference in expected values is simply not as large. The impact is a function of both of these.

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Not all video poker games are created equal.
The full pay 8/5 Bonus Poker games (8 for a full house/5 for a flush) return over 99%. Then there are 8/5 Bonus Poker games that return more than 100%, and 8/5 Bonus Poker that returns less than 99%.
Confused yet? You should be. The key to knowing your returns is to keep an eye on the pay lines to know what your return should be.
To learn the returns for a video poker game you should always begin looking at the full house and flush. This is the most basic way to find out what pay table you are dealing with. To find out more about your video poker pay table look at the bottom.
If you are receiving the same even money for one pair and two pair, your return on an 8/5 Bonus Poker game will only be 86%. Meanwhile, if you look at the top of your pay table and notice your 8/5 Bonus Poker game is a progressive machine that pays a larger amount than 4,000 credits ($1,000 for a quarter machine) for a Royal Flush you could be closing in on a 100% return game, depending on where the progressive is running.
Progressive jackpots in video poker can be close to a great equalizer to bad video poker payables. A decent progressive jackpot for a Royal Flush of $1,200 on a 25 cent 7/5 Bonus Poker (7 for a full house, 5 for a flush) machine can increase your returns by 5%. For reference, this cuts the difference from an 8/5 Bonus Poker game to a 7/5 Bonus Poker game in half. Not too shabby.
Progressive jackpots in video poker definitely help make a bad pay table less bad and can make a good pay table great. Given equal pay tables you’re always going to have a better return when you play a progressive video poker game. If you’re not a math person and can’t figure the percentages out on your own don’t worry. There’s an app for that.
Seriously.
The WinPoker app that I use to practice my video poker game allows for the user to add their own pay tables and run an analysis on the game. This only takes a minute or two and is a great asset when walking through the casino.
If you prefer to learn different progressive pay tables before you head to the casino you can run different scenarios for progressive jackpots at home on WinPoker. There are also a few different websites that will allow you to run similar functionality from your home computer.
If you’re a video poker player I always recommend giving the progressive video poker machines a look when walking through the casino. You may even find that your returns on these video poker machines are the best of any video poker games in the casino.

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I may be giving away one of the greatest trade secrets I know. I hope this doesn’t come back to haunt me.
I realize I have a strong math background, but when I started in this industry, I didn’t realize what I’m about to show you is not universally understood. It is how to calculate the payback of a pay table.
When an inventor asks me to provide frequencies of hands for side bets, I quickly provide them. In return, I get a document that asks me to verify their payback calculation. This, inevitably leads me to ask them – What did you do???
It simply isn’t that hard. You take the frequency (i.e. probability) of a particular hand and multiply it by the payout of that hand. This gives us the contribution rate of that hand. If the hand pays 5 to 1, we use 6 because the payout includes the return of the original wager. When we add up the contribution rates of all the winning hands, we get the payback.
No need to use squares, square roots, imaginary numbers or pi. It is a very simple formula. To illustrate, let’s use a common pay table for Pair Plus:
To get the frequency of each hand, I used a program to determine the number of occurrences of each hand (they can also be calculated using combinatorial math). I divide these occurrences by 22,100, which is the number of unique hands of three cards from a 52-card deck to get the frequencies.
I then multiply each of these frequencies by the payout. As the payouts for Pair Plus are “to 1,” the numbers above represent the full-pay version of the paytable of 40, 30, 6, 4, 1. When we sum up the values, we find the hit frequency is 25.6109% (this is the sum of the frequencies of the winning hands) and the payback is 97.6833%, which is the sum of the Contribution rates.
Payback Calculation – Pair Plus
Hand
Frequency
Pays
Contribution
Straight Flush
0.2172%
41
8.9050%
Three of a Kind
0.2353%
31
7.2941%
Straight
3.2579%
7
22.8054%
Flush
4.9593%
5
24.7964%
Pair
16.9412%
2
33.8824%
Total
25.6109%

97.6833%
* Includes the return of the original wager
The information in this simple table is very important in understanding what to expect. First of all, we can expect to win roughly 1 in 4 hands. About 2/3 of these wins will be a Pair. We should get a Flush about 1 in 20 hands and a Straight about 1 in 33. Three of a Kinds and Straight Flushes are considerably rarer, each being in the 1 in 400-500 range.
While Pairs will make up about two in three winning hands, it will account for only about 1/3 of our money won. Flushes and Straights together add up to roughly half of our expected win in monetary terms. So, if you don’t get your fair share of these, getting a couple of extra Pairs may not help your bankroll much.
Get on a hot streak of Straights and Flushes and you could be heading for a good night.
What is also quickly learned from this table is the impact of reducing the payout of any particular hand. If the Flush only pays 3 instead of 4, then we will multiply its frequency by 4 instead of 5, resulting in a decrease of the contribution rate for Flush, and in turn the overall payback by almost 5%.
If we decrease the Straight payout by 1 it will reduce the payback by 3.25%. If a casino chooses to pay out 50 for the Straight Flush, this will increase the payback by about 2.17% (10 times the frequency of 0.2172%).
If you remember the rough probability of each of these hands, you can quickly compute the approximate payback of the Pair Plus pay table that you are playing at. This process is not unique to Pair Plus. It applies to virtually any game with a pay table.
In the case of head to head games, against the dealer, the computation might get more complex because you have to take into account the frequency of beating the dealer and the frequency of a final hand. It is also very applicable to video poker and can be used to help a Player quickly determine if a particular pay table is worth playing.
In the case of Video Poker there is also additional complexity. Because the Player’s strategy effects the distribution of final hands, the actual frequency is a bit of a moving target. For the sake of “ballparking” the impact of a pay table change, using some baseline numbers works quite well.
I’ll cover this topic more fully in an upcoming column.

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There are 36 entries on the strategy table for Jacks or Better video poker. I’m sure I could categorize them numerous ways, but for today, I’m going with a particular thought.
Six of the 36 are complete hands in which there is no need to draw any more cards. This includes Quads, in which the fifth card is meaningless. Four more deal with “sets” – Three of a Kind, Two Pair, High Pair and Low Pair. That leaves us with 26 others.
Of these 26 others, five are reserved for partial Royal Flushes and one belongs to a partial Flush. There are four more belonging to the “mutt” hands – 3 High Cards, 2 High Cards, 1 High Card and the Razgu. That leaves 16 more. Of these 16, there are six belonging to 4-Card Straights. That leaves the final 10, which belong to…drum roll, please…partial Straight Flushes.
Two belonging to the 4-Card Straight Flush and 4-Card Inside Straight Flush and the remainder all belonging to some variant of a 3-Card Straight Flush. This means more than 22% of the strategy table belongs to a hand that is probably the most forgotten on the entire pay table.
It pays only double what a Four of a Kind does, yet is more than 20 times as rare (partially because of its relatively low payout). It occurs about four times as often as a Royal, yet the Royal pays 800 vs. a mere 50 for a Straight Flush.
Despite all this, a Straight Flush is a significant contributor to our overall payback and learning how to play it correctly is critical to mastering Expert Strategy. Earlier, I said 22% of the strategy table is taken up by these hands, yet they make up only 2.4% of our dealt hands.
Keep in mind, this does NOT mean 1 in 40 hands contain a 3-Card Straight Flush of some type. This means you should be playing about 1 in 40 hands as a 3-Card Straight Flush. Many of these will be played as something else.
For example, we play all pairs over a 3-Card Straight Flush of any type. So, if you have 7D, 8D, 9D, 9S, KC, you play the Pair of 9’s. This is not even a close decision. The Low Pair has an expected value of 0.82, while the 3-Card Straight Flush is only 0.63. The numbers for the 3-Card Straight Flush only get worse if it is Inside or Double Inside (6D, 8D, 9D, 9S, KC).
The rules for 3-Card Straight Flushes are very subtle. We play a 3-Card Inside Straight Flush over a 2-Card Royal, So, if you have 9H, JH, QH, 2C, 3C, we play the 3-Card Inside Straight Flush over the 2-Card Royal. However, if the 9H was an 8H, making it a Double Inside Straight Flush, then the JQ wins out and we play as an RF2V3 – a 2-card Royal containing a JQ.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the impact of mistakes is based on the difference in expected value and the frequency of the mistake (assuming it is a repetitive mistake). Hands involving 3-Card Straight Flushes are not the most common. The difference in expected values will vary greatly between the different hands we are talking about
If you’re dealt 3H, 4H, 5H, JC, KS – the correct play is the 3-card Straight Flush by a difference of about 0.14. Even, if the hand were 2H, 4H, 5H, JC, KS then you would still play the 3-Card Straight Flush, but the difference narrows to a mere, 0.04. However, if we change the hand to 2H, 4H, 6H, JC, KS then the 2 High Cards outranks the 3-Card Double Inside Straight Flush.
One of the key things to remember about 3-Card Straight Flushes is that they are all playable. This does not mean if you have one you play it. It means you NEVER discard a 3-Card Straight Flush of any type in favor of a Razgu. So, even if you’re dealt what appears to be a horrendous hand (2D, 3D, 6D, 8S, 10C), you play the 3-Card Double Inside Straight with 0 High Cards over throwing all five cards.
If I had to take an educated guess, I’d say most new players do one of two things with 3-Card Straight Flushes. Either they miss them completely and virtually never play them, or they play them over many superior hands (i.e. 4-Card Straights and Low Pairs). The reason why casinos can offer 99-plus percent paybacks on video poker is because more players don’t use the right strategy.
Learning how to play 3-Card Straight Flushes may not be the first lesson in Expert Strategy, but it is still an important piece and shows why you must pay attention to all the details.

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