The Essential Video Poker Strategic Guidelines

Published: May 8, 2014

Everyone has is familiar with online casino games can tell you that video poker requires a great deal of strategy if you want to have a strong overall payout rate. However, a lot of people don't really have the time to work through hours and hours of study, instructional hands and practice sessions to get to the point that they can play mathematically-perfect video poker. For those people, we have a list of the essential video poker guidelines that you need to know when it comes to strategy. If you apply these guidelines to your game, then you will be playing really well in no time.

On the most basic level, every video poker hand is about choosing the right set of discards. There are several different ways to set up discards for any hand, and if you rank them all in terms of how much money you're going to make on average from each one, then you can measure your mistakes by how far you are from the best possible decision. While you can't be expected to evaluate the tons of ways to discard from a hand, you can use basic ideas to give you hints as to what you should be shooting for.

There are two major types of hands: made hands and draws. If you have a made hand, you're typically going to go with that. If you have a draw, you're almost always going to go with that. However, difficult situations come up when you have two different draws you can go for or a choice between a made hand and a draw. Knowing which draws are better than made hands, which made hands are better than draws, and which draws are better than other draws is the key to getting better at video poker very quickly. These are the essential guidelines.

For example, a high pair is better than a flush draw. However, a flush draw is better than a low pair, and a low pair is better than a straight draw. That covers half or more of all difficult situations in two sentences. See how easy that was when you know what to focus on? Four to a royal flush is better than any made straight or flush, and while that situation doesn't come up often, it's an absolutely huge mistake just waiting to happen if you don't correctly break your made hands.