Playing the Draw Correctly in Various Video Poker Games

Published: September 4, 2014

When you look at video poker as a whole, you need to think about which strategic decisions you actually have that can make an impact on your final payout rate of the game as a whole. Because there are five cards, there are 32 different combinations of cards that you can discard for any given hand. What you need to remember is that there's only going to be one combination of discards that's correct, and your goal is to try to find the correct one as much as possible without deviating further from the second or third best.

For players who first start out, there are different rules and guidelines that can help you to get moving in the right direction more often. You learn things like four cards to a royal are stronger than five cards to a flush, and you also learn that three to a royal is often stronger than four to a regular flush draw. Aside from these general rules, you start to get a feel for common sense plays. For example, if you have something like AA849 with no flush draw, the only logical combination to keep is AA.

Once you understand the basics, you start looking at more difficult scenarios. For example, what if you have a pair and a four-card draw at the same time? Which combination of cards should you keep. These are difficult decisions because there is more than one logical way to continue the hand, so you have to learn how to play these types of spots. For example, you might learn that you should keep high pairs over flush draws, but flush draws over low pairs in a game like Jacks or Better or most other non-wild card games except for All American.

Finally, you start to look at the really difficult spots that are anti-intuitive in nature. This is mostly going to include exceptions to the rules you've learned already and how to play hands with no clearly obvious way to go. For example, a lot of high card hands with no obvious draw fall under this category. These are the hardest spots to learn because they require learning about video poker on a very deep level, but they will add a fair amount to your bottom line. Overall, these are the basic ways you should approach playing the draw in these games.