A Complete Guide to Video Poker

Welcome to the video poker section of our site. This game, along with blackjack, is one of our two favorite games in the casino. Not only does video poker provide some of the best odds in the casino, but it’s also one of the most fun gambling machines on the floor.

Video poker is even more exciting when you play at online casinos with loads of video poker variants and exciting bonuses. These are some of our favorite online. We are confident that you’ll enjoy playing video poker online at any of them.

Video poker looks like a slot machine and indeed has a lot of similarities with slots. The biggest difference between the two games is the payback percentage. The amount of money that a gambling machine is programmed to pay back per $100 is considered its payback percentage. Here’s an example:

You’re playing a slot machine for $1 per spin. You make 100 spins, so you’ve wagered $100. The machine is programmed with a 92% payback percentage, so you lose $8 total, and you still have $92 left in your bankroll.

In that example, that’s an expected return. Your actual results will vary due to the standard deviation. You might finish your short slots session by winning $8, or $16, or even $24. Or you might lose a greater amount.

The payback percentage is a long-term expected result based on probability. The more bets you make, the more likely it is that you’ll see results that mirror the expected return. Casinos count on this in order to make a profit.

The payback percentage of most video poker games starts at 96%, but many of them offer payback percentages of 99%+.

Another way to look at this number is as the house edge. That’s just the payback percentage subtracted from 100%. This is the way we look at the casino’s advantage for most table games.

Here’s an example:

You’re playing a “full pay” Jacks or Better game. The payback percentage is 99.54%. Subtract that from 100%, and you’re left with 0.46%. That’s the house edge.

The house edge is the amount of each bet that the casino expects to win over the long run. For the player, the lower the house edge is, the better.

0.46% is exceptional, by the way. The only other game in the casino that even comes close is blackjack, and the house edge for that game varies based on the conditions at the table.

The rest of this page focuses on what you need to know about how video poker works, how to play, and what kinds of strategies can help you improve your odds.

Just because it looks like a slot machine doesn’t make it a slot machine. Even though a video poker game looks like a slot machine, the mechanics of what’s actually happening on the screen are quite different from what you’d expect. The most important change in the mechanics is the amount of information available to the player.

With a slot machine, you get paid certain prize amounts based on what combination of symbols come up on the screen in front of you. You might win $1000 on a $1 bet if you get three red cherries in a row, for example.

That probability is controlled by the slot machine’s random number generator, which has settings that are determined by the manufacturer in order to meet a certain expected payback percentage.

Getting a cherry on any given reel after a spin might be programmed to happen one in every ten spins, or it might be one in every twenty spins, or it might be one in every one hundred spins, or any other number.

By manipulating the probabilities of getting certain results, then comparing that with the payout amount of these combinations, a slot machine manufacturer can predict within a few tenths of a percentage point how much that machine is going to pay out in winnings over time.

In fact, if you had that information, you could calculate the machine’s payout percentage, too.

Instead of symbols on spinning reels, the action in video poker takes place over five “stops,” and the result in each one of those is from a deck of standard playing cards. In most video poker games, a virtual fifty-two-card deck is used, although some games use a fifty-three-card deck with a joker thrown in as a wild card.

Since the probability of getting any particular card or any particular combination of cards is known, you can compare the payouts for certain hands with the probability of getting that hand and getting an expected payback percentage.

In video poker, instead of getting paid off by some arbitrary combination like three cherries, you get paid off based on the poker hand ranking of your final result. A royal flush is the top-paying hand, a straight flush is usually the second-highest-paying hand, and so on.

Learning how to play video poker is easy and doesn’t take long. The first thing you do is insert your money. The computer inside the machine converts your money into credits (or “coins”).

The most common denominations for video poker machines are quarter and dollar machines. So if you insert $100 into a dollar machine, you’ll have 100 credits. Insert that same $100 into a quarter machine, and you’ll have 400 credits.

All of the payoffs for the various hands are based on credits.

Once you’ve inserted your money, you decide how many coins you want to wager on each hand. You should always wager max coins, which on most video poker machines is five coins.

The top hand in almost every video poker game is the royal flush. That hand usually pays out at 250 to 1 if you’re playing fewer than five coins, but if you’re playing five coins, it pays off at 800 to 1. That’s a huge difference.

In fact, if you’re uncomfortable playing for five coins, you should lower your stakes. It’s cool if you don’t want to play for $5 per hand. Just scale it down to a quarter machine and play for $1.25 per hand. But don’t cheat yourself out of that bonus payout for the highest possible hand by betting only $1 per hand on a dollar video poker machine.

Once you’ve decided how much you want to bet per hand, you can press the deal button. When you do, your account on the machine is debited by your bet amount, and you get five cards dealt to you. You have the option of keeping any combination of cards and discarding any combination of cards.

Once you’ve decided which cards to keep and which ones to throw away, the machine deals your replacement cards. Then you get paid off based on the strength of your hand.

You’ll notice something else about this setup if you’re paying attention. Since the probability of getting certain hands is a known factor, you can make intelligent decisions about how to play each hand in order to get the best possible expected outcome every time.

Take the following scenario, for example:

If you keep the jacks, you have a 100% chance of getting an even money payout. So the expected value there starts at $1, but you also have a chance of improving your hand to three of a kind, and you have a chance at a full house or two pairs, too.

If you keep the three cards to a flush, you have a 1/25 chance of making your flush. Since that hand pays off at 6 to 1, the expected value of that bet is less than $1. The obvious choice is to keep the pair and throw away the flush draw.

On the other hand, suppose you have four cards to a royal flush, and you also have a pair. The odds of making your royal if you break the flush is about 1/47, but the payoff if you succeed is 800 coins. That’s far better than an expected value of $1, so you should break the pair and go for the royal flush. Even though the odds of hitting the hand are around 2%, the payoff is more than worth it.

The game continues like this, hand by hand, until you’re out of money or ready to quit.

Our favorite aspect of video poker is the transparency of the game. When you’re playing a slot machine, you don’t have any way of knowing what the house edge is or how much you can expect to lose per hour. You have half the information you need to calculate that—how much each combination pays out.

What you’re missing on a slot machine is the probability of getting each combination.

But with video poker, you know the odds of getting the various hands, because it’s based on a deck of 52 playing cards.

The biggest perk of video poker is the extremely low house edge. When you combine that low house edge with the 0.3% or 0.4% you get back from being a member of the slots club, you turn a negative expectation game into a positive expectation game.

You can play free video poker games on all kinds of sites on the Internet. This is a good idea because you can get a feel for the game and how it works. Understanding the basics of how the game moves is essential to avoiding mistakes that just cost money because you did something dumb.

Jacks or Better is the most common variation you’ll find, and it’s the basis for all other video poker games. Understanding the basics of how to play this one will serve you well as you learn other games. You can learn a more detailed strategy later, but here is a quick strategy that will still keep the house edge under 1%:

Always hold the following hands:

If you have 3 of a kind, you will want to discard the other 2 cards though. Your goal is to improve to a full house or a 4-of-a-kind. Never keep a kicker, though.

Also, with 2 pairs, you’ll always discard the 5^th card in your hand in order to try to improve your hand to a full house.

You’ll USUALLY hold the following hands, but the exceptions are noted in parenthesis:

A flush or a straight

(You’ll break these hands up in order to draw to a royal flush, but only if you have 4 cards to the royal.)

A pair of jacks or higher

(You’ll break this hand up if you can draw to a straight flush or a royal flush.)

If you don’t have a paying hand, look for one of the following hands:

A low pair

You’ll usually try to hit 3 of a kind with this one.

Straight draws

You’ll usually draw to an outside straight draw, but you will never draw to an inside straight draw. An outside straight draw is one that can be completed with a high card or a low card, but an inside straight draw is one where you need a card in the middle to complete it. The difference is that 8 cards will fill the outside straight draw, while only 4 cards will fill the inside straight draw.

Those are the basics. Most of the rest of the strategy just involves drawing to a flush or a straight when the opportunities present themselves.

You should, of course, learn the actual strategy for Jacks or Better as soon as possible, but this will get you started. Also, with this strategy, you’re still playing one of the lowest-house-edge games in the casino.

Depending on where you play, the pay tables for some games will offer better odds than others. If you know how to play multiple games well, then you can choose the game with the best odds. But you can only do this if you know multiple strategies.

The pay table is what determines how much you win based on the strength of a given hand. You’ll find pay tables on slot machines, too, but they’re relatively meaningless — again, you don’t have any way of knowing what the probability of getting a particular result is on a slot machine game.

Here’s an example pay table from a Jacks or Better video poker game:

You’ll notice a couple of things right away. One of the most important is that the hands all pay out the same regardless of how many coins you bet, except for one — the royal flush. You just multiply the payout by the number of coins wagered to get the payout on a particular hand.

But with a royal flush, you get a payout of 250 to 1 on every bet except for the five-coin bet. On that one, you get an 800 to 1 payout (or 4000 coins).

All video poker tables resemble this one to a greater or less degree. In Jacks or Better, which is the plain vanilla version of video poker that all other games are based on, the casinos and manufacturers focus on changing just two payouts in order to tweak their payback percentage for the games — the full house and the flush.

You can see that in the above paytable, the full house pays off at 9 to 1 and the flush pays off at 6 to 1. This is what’s considered a “9/6 Jacks or Better” game, or a “full pay” game. The payback percentage for a Jacks or Better game with this pay table is 99.54%.

You’ll be more likely to find a Jacks or Better game that pays off 8 to 1 for a full house and 5 to 1 for a flush. This is an 8/5 machine, and the payback percentage for such a game is significantly lower than that of a full-pay machine — 97.3%.

You’ll also find games with 7/5 payouts and 6/5 payouts.

The difference between a 99.54% payout and a 97.3% payout might not sound like much. After all, if you earned that grade in a college course, you’d have an A+ with either score.

But let’s look at how that difference might affect an average player’s bottom line.

You can calculate a player’s expected loss per hour by multiplying the number of bets she makes per hour by the average amount of each bet and then multiplying that result by the house edge.

The average video poker player plays 600 hands per hour. (We know that seems like a lot, but the game plays a lot faster than you would think when just reading about it.) Suppose you’re playing for $5 per hand. That’s $3000 per hour in action.

The house edge for the full pay machine is 0.46%, so that’s the amount you expect to lose per hour—0.46% times $3000. That’s $13.80 per hour.

But the house edge for that 8/5 machine is 2.7%. $3000 X 2.7% is $81.

There’s a huge difference between expecting to lose $13.80 per hour and $81 per hour.

But don’t get us wrong. Even 8/5 Jacks or Better is an improvement over the average payback percentage of a similar-denomination slot machine. Even at a good casino, you might only be looking at a 95% payout percentage on a slot machine of that denomination.

Worse yet, you don’t have any way of knowing what the payback percentage is for the slots game you’re playing. With video poker, you know what kind of gamble you’re getting for your money.

Besides Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild is the most popular video poker game in the casino. And if you can find the right pay table, you can even get an edge over the house.

Here’s the full pay version of Deuces Wild:

With the above pay table, if you play the optimal strategy on every hand, the payback percentage for this game is 100.76%. This makes full pay Deuces Wild one of the only games in the casino where the player has an edge over the house. If you’re a member of the slots club, you can get an extra 0.3% to 0.4% back in rebates, too.

Here’s a table with the most common Deuces Wild pay tables and their payback percentages:

You’ll notice that any of these hands is subject to a change in payout, which is why this pay table comparison has 6 potential payouts listed instead of just 2 like the Jacks or Better table.

Bonus Poker is a family of Jacks or Better variations which offer different payouts for various rankings of a 4 of a kind. But like Jacks or Better, most of these variations only differ when it comes to 2 or 3 hands in the pay table, usually the full house and the flush.

The games which fit into this family include the following:

Let’s use Bonus Poker Deluxe as our first example. It’s called “Bonus” Poker Deluxe because of the bonus payout on the 4 of a kind. In a standard Jacks or Better game, that hand pays off at 25 to 1. But no matter what pay table of Bonus Poker Deluxe you’re playing on, the payoff for that hand is 80 to 1 instead.

The game pays for this change by reducing the payoff for 2 pairs from 2 to 1 to 1 to 1, the same as the payoff for a pair of jacks or better.

But like Jacks or Better, the manufacturers and the casinos vary the payoffs for the full house and the flush, which changes the payback percentages accordingly.

Here’s the comparison:

As you can see, the payback percentages for this game are slightly better than for Jacks or Better. The big difference is that bigger payoff for the 4 of a kind.

The other Bonus Poker variations offer different payoffs based on the ranking of the cards in the 4 of a kind. For example, in Double Bonus Poker, a 4 of a kind made up of aces pays off at 160 to 1. If it’s made up of 2s, 3s, or 4s, it pays off at 80 to 1, and if it’s any other rank, it only pays off at 25 to 1.

We have an entire section of this site devoted to explaining the differences between video poker games.

You’ll find dozens of different video poker games available in any casino at any given time. These largely resemble Jacks or Better, but they usually offer different payouts for certain hands or some other wrinkles to mix up the gameplay a little bit.

Possibly the most common video poker game variation (besides Jacks or Better) is Deuces Wild. The game has two distinct differences from Jacks or Better:

You can find a comprehensive list of video poker games and how they work in our video poker games section. We include strategy advice for each variation, too.

Another common video poker game is called Joker Poker. You can view it as a midway point between Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, as it only has a single wild card — the Joker. So you’ll see better hands in Joker Poker, on average, than you will in Jacks or Better. But you won’t see them as frequently as you would in a Deuces Wild game. There’s a big difference between having a single wild card in the deck and having four wild cards in the deck.

Bonus Poker is another variation. This one plays just like Jacks or Better, but it features bonus payouts for a four-of-a-kind. You’ll find multiple versions of Bonus Poker available, most of which vary the payouts for a four-of-a-kind based on the rankings of the cards in that hand.

Other variations offer you the option of paying an extra coin or two on each hand in order to get a multiplier applied to your wins. A dizzying array of these variations exists.

You’ll also find an online video poker section on this site. In that section, we look at the video poker games available at various online casinos in terms of which software is used to power that casino.

What many gamblers who are new to the online casino scene don’t realize is that there are only maybe three dozen kinds of online casino software out there. Most internet casinos lease their software from a software provider, and if you play at one casino using that software, the games are the same as at any other casino using that software.

Bovada and Slots.lv both use RealTime Gaming software. So regardless of which casino you sign up for, you’ll have the same video poker games with (usually) the same pay tables available at either casino.

This makes it easy for humble gambling writers like us to write about online video poker, though. With over 3000 online casinos out there, it would be a Herculean task to write about all of them if they each had unique games available.

Our online video poker section includes detailed information about how sign-up bonuses work for video poker players, and we offer recommendations for which online casinos are safe places to play, as opposed to some online casinos which are NOT safe places to play.

We take all relevant factors into account when we evaluate online video poker casinos. It’s not easy to get our stamp of approval, which is why you can expect to be treated right at all the sites we listed above.

Legitimate video poker casino sites carry licenses that have been issued by well-known, trustworthy jurisdictions. Applicants must jump through many hoops, and they have to come up with six-figure licensing fees.

We all deal with companies that do business online every day, either directly or indirectly. Online gambling is a completely accepted industry all around the world, and the real money casinos we approved above are legit in every way.

At the end of the day, real money online video poker is all about the Benjamins.

Deposit and withdrawal methods are key, and the top video poker casinos make it relatively easy to fund your account and initiate payouts.

The online casinos we feel comfortable recommending offer generous deposit bonuses for video poker players, with reasonable rollover requirements and other terms and conditions.

These real-money video poker casinos place an emphasis on the customer experience. Just like any business, they want to satisfy the people who visit to engender loyalty.

Empowered customer service agents can be reached over the phone, email, and live chat.

When you think about the game of video poker, it’s generated by computer software. A casino is simply a repository of individual terminals that are running programs that could potentially be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Unless you really enjoy the experience at a particular casino, why go anywhere when you can play online video poker for real money from the comfort of your own home?

When you embrace this option, you have something fun and exciting to do. You can play video poker at your convenience, and you don’t have to expose yourself to an uncertain physical environment.

You can read full reviews of all these real money online casinos here. On this page, we’ve restricted our comments to a few of the top USA video poker sites and how well each property serves the needs of online VP players. We’re confident that these really are the best video poker casino websites on the Internet.

If you’re from the United States, El Royale is your best bet for playing online video poker games. Many online casinos don’t accept real money players from the USA, and a lot of those that do have problems processing deposit and withdrawal requests. That’s not an issue at El Royale. This online casino has 14 different video poker games available, including the following.

As well as single-hand versions of these games, they also have multi-hand versions. Many of the payout tables are full pay. One of the only real downsides for VP players at El Royale casino is when it comes to bonuses. Video poker bonuses at online casinos are actually quite rare, as the game has such a low edge. So, although El Royale offers a number of generous bonuses, none of them can be used for playing video poker games. However, that doesn’t stop this from being the top US online casino for real-money video poker players.

There are 17 real money video poker games to play at Vegas Casino Online. It’s a similar selection to most of the other VP sites discussed above, with nothing unique of note on offer. They do offer higher stakes than most, though, so high rollers looking to play video poker online should definitely consider this casino. We should mention that there is a VP bonus here, but the rollover requirements are high at 90x.

We’ve tried to include a comprehensive amount of video poker information on our site, but we can’t be all things to all people. When we need to do research, we do so by consulting with other high-quality video poker websites. Note that these sites are listed in alphabetical order. We don’t rank them in any other way.

Bob Dancer is the leading expert in the video poker field today. He’s written several books, many of which are available to buy on his site.

Jean Scott might argue that she’s just as much of an expert on video poker as Bob Dancer, but she actually writes a broader range of materials that include getting the most out of casino coupons and promotional offers.

Dan Paymar is one of our favorite video poker writers, too. Optimum Play is the name for both his website and his excellent book on the subject of the math behind the game. He’s one of the pioneers of the industry.

This almost isn’t really an information site, at all. But it’s important because the land-based casinos in this group in Las Vegas offer the widest selection of full pay games in the industry.

The content on videopokeradvisor.com is more or less introductory, but the design is straightforward and blessedly low on advertising. It’s worth visiting, especially if you’re a beginner.

This is less of an informational site than a product site where you can buy training software. That being said, the content on this site is straightforward enough, and the software is not only affordable but well worth your money.

VideoPokerInfo.com is another great guide for beginners. It includes excellent info about progressive jackpots, comp and VIP points, and single-hand versus multi-hand games.

No other site on the Internet offers as many free games as this one. Not only that, but these games are more similar to the games you’ll find in Las Vegas casinos than just about any other online versions. It’s a membership-driven site. Most of the games are free, but some of the games require you to have a membership to play.

If you’re interested in playing the machines with the best pay tables, this is the site to visit. They feature listings for casinos throughout the United States along with user-submitted reports on which pay tables are available where.

We have an entire section devoted to where and how to play free video poker games online. Your reasons for playing a free video poker game might vary, but a lot of players use such games to practice their skills. Since strategy matters, knowing how to play each hand before putting into real money into action is a good idea.

Almost all online casinos offer their games in a free or play money mode, and that includes their video poker games. Of course, their motivation for providing those free games is clear — they want you to have so much fun that you’ll want to try their real money versions of the games. But if you just want to play for free without risking any money, you’re welcome to do that.

You can also find video poker strategy trainers online where you play for free and even get advice back from the game as to which cards are correct to keep and/or throw away. The graphics on these trainers are usually less robust than the graphics you’ll see from an online casino, but there are perks to being able to play for free and get strategy advice.

You can also find plenty of sites that offer free video games of all kinds, and they often include video poker in the mix. Various apps and software downloads offer free video poker games, too.

There are many ways to play video poker for free online. Here are a few reasons why you should play them at a traditional casino site.

It clearly makes sense to play free video poker at real money online casinos. In fact, we don’t think you should bother playing anywhere else.

This is true even if you never plan to play video poker with real cash. Or if you don’t want to create an online casino account. Neither is an issue if you join the right online casino.

So, why not do that and enjoy all the perks these casinos offer – like their variety of free online video poker games and variants?

The Google Play store is probably the best place to search for Android video poker apps. When we did a search there, we got over 200 different results. Many of them had generic names like “video poker”, but some of them were more specific, like Jacks or Better or Deuces Wild.

We were unable to find any Android video poker apps that carried a cost with them. All of these video poker apps were free. We suspect that many of them serve to advertise, but also some of them are marketing tools for actual online casinos. We’re not sure what Google’s policies are for those kinds of apps in their Play Store, but the online gambling industry is notoriously good at getting around these kinds of restrictions.

These games fall into the “simulated gambling” category in the app store. There’s a huge market for such games. We’ve always been puzzled at people who were interested in simulated gambling, as we think having money on the line is the point.

We looked at screenshots of a lot of these video poker apps, and they do indeed look just like the machines you’d find in a traditional casino. In fact, we were impressed with the graphics for most of the Android apps we tried.

VideoPoker.com seems to be hard at work putting together apps for specific games for iPad and iPhone devices. Their site is advertising-supported, too. They don’t offer any real money games to play. As such, you can expect that their apps are also free-play versions of these games.

At the time we wrote this page, the only iPad game available was one that analyzed various pay tables so that you can choose which game you want to play in the casino. This is much more useful than just free play versions of video poker games, so props to VideoPoker.com for offering something cool and useful.

They have a couple more options available for the iPhone. One of these is called “Best Hold”. It’s basically a video poker strategy card that’s part of your phone. The other option is called “Video Poker Pocket”. It makes several free play versions of video poker available for you to play on your phone.

That’s an interesting site which seems to have a goal of just increasing the popularity of video poker as it’s played in the casinos. Every time we expect to be bombarded with an ad for an online casino, we’re pleasantly surprised that no hard sell is coming at all.

Of course, those VideoPoker.com apps aren’t the only ones available for Apple users. You can search the iTunes store for more video poker apps that are available with those products.

Many of the apps available there include strategy and instruction functionality, too, in addition to the free play games.

The Kindle Fire doesn’t get nearly as much press as Android or iPhone/iPad. That’s probably because the Kindle line started off as an ebook reader rather than as a cell phone. At any rate, you can find plenty of video poker apps available for the Kindle Fire, too. All you have to do is visit Amazon to see what’s available.

We were disappointed to see that the video poker apps available for the Kindle Fire seemed less authentic than the apps we saw for the other operating systems we’ve discussed. They have several options available, and they look fun, they just don’t seem to capture the spirit of the game as it’s actually played in the casinos.

We have an entire section devoted to video poker strategy, too.

In that respect, video poker is much like blackjack. Since we’re dealing with known probabilities based on a fifty-two card deck, we can determine with a great amount of accuracy what the correct play is on every single hand. When you make the correct play on every hand, you’re engaged in optimal strategy.

The payback percentages that have been calculated for the various games all assume that you’re playing with optimal strategy. If you’re making mistakes while you’re playing, your actual payback percentage is going to deviate significantly from the number quoted. But most players with a little bit of card sense aren’t giving up more than 1%.

On the other hand, new video poker players who have no idea what they’re doing might be giving up as much as 3% or 4% per hand.

And if you want to know how much of a difference that makes to your bankroll and how fast, take a look at the section of this page (above) in which we compare the difference between 9/6 Jacks or Better and 8/5 Jacks or Better.

The basic strategy for any video poker game is determined by comparing the expected value of each decision and choosing the one with the highest expected mathematical return for the player.

Example:

You’re playing Jacks or Better. You’re dealt a hand that has a pair in it, but it’s also a draw to a royal flush—you only need one card to fill the royal flush. You have to decide between the sure win and the longshot.

How do you know which decision is the correct one?

If you keep the pair, you have a 100% chance of getting at least an even money payout. That’s an expected return of 100% X 1. (It’s actually a little higher than that, because you could still improve the hand by holding the pair—you might improve to a 3-of-a-kind, 2 pairs, 4-of-a-kind, or full house.)

On the other hand, if you break the pair and shoot for the royal flush, you’re breaking up a sure thing in exchange for a shot at a larger win. A royal flush usually pays 800 to 1. So the payoff is huge if you make your hand.

But it’s only huge if you compare it with the likelihood that you’ll get the hand.

If you have 4 cards to a royal flush, there’s only one card left in the deck that can fill your hand. You have a 1 in 47 chance of being dealt that card. (5 of the cards are already accounted for.) That’s about 2%. (It’s actually a little better than 2%.)

2% multiplied by 800 is 16, which is the expected value of that choice.

Since 16 is way better than 1, you should break up the pair in order to draw to the royal flush.

But what if you have a pair and only 3 cards to a royal flush? Do you still go for the royal flush in this situation?

The expected value for keeping the pair is still 1.

But now you have to be dealt 2 cards to complete your royal flush. The probability of getting both of the cards you need is 2% X 2%, or 0.04%. 800 X 0.04% is 0.32, which is less than 1, which means you should keep the pair.

If you have a good beginner strategy chart, you only lose about 0.1% of the expected return when compared to using the more granular expert strategy.

Here’s what that means to you in terms of hourly expectations:

When you calculate your hourly expected loss (or win, if you have an edge against the casino), you take 3 factors into account:

Most video poker players play at a rate of 600 hands per hour. Let’s assume you’re playing for $1 per hand, and you’re making the 5-coin bet, which means you’re really playing for $5 per hand.

That’s $3000 per hour you’re putting into action.

If you’re playing Jacks or Better with perfect (or “expert”) strategy, you face a house edge of 0.46%.

Your expected loss per hour is $13.80.

If you’re using a more simplified strategy for the game, you’re going to lose an additional 0.1% per hour on average. On $3000 in action per hour, that’s an extra $3, so your hourly loss increases from $13.80 to $16.80.

We don’t normally concern ourselves with $3 per hour, because learning strategy for video poker at an expert level is HARD. But we know plenty of gamblers who are willing to go to the extra length to make that happen.

Since this site is written in English, a large percentage of our visitors come from the United States. And video poker is more popular in the United States than anywhere else in the world. So it made sense for us to create a section about the game as it’s played in the USA.

This section includes a rundown of which states offer casinos with real money video poker and which states don’t. We also look at what the various states have to say about the legalities of playing online for real money.

The United States is a big, diverse country with fifty different states. Almost every state has a different legal attitude toward gambling online or off. We cover how each state deals with our favorite game in this section.

We also break it down to certain major gambling cities and what they offer in terms of video poker. Two of the major cities that we specifically take a look at are Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

In the early 1990s, only six states offered legalized gambling through land-based casinos and/or riverboats.

Today, 20 states offer commercial casinos, which are privately owned gaming establishments that operate on nontribal land. 28 states have Native American casinos, which are located on sovereign land.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act IGRA of 1988 paved the way for Native American casinos, allowing them to offer Class II games bingo, pull tabs, poker, bridge, and contract bridge.

This is an important distinction because video poker machines are Class III, meaning they operate with a random number generator RNG. Any gaming establishment that’s licensed for Class III games can offer video poker and slot machines.

But tribal casinos have gotten creative by offering video poker machines that look like the real deal, yet operate like bingo games. Results of a Class II video poker game are determined like a bingo card, although this is set up to closely mimic what you’d expect from Class III video poker.

Bottom line: over half of US states can find video poker at commercial and/or Native American casinos in their area. And with more states relaxing their gaming laws, you can expect video poker to continue expanding across the US.

Online video poker is neither legal nor illegal by federal law. The only law concerning video poker and other forms of online gaming is the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act UIGEA of 2006.

Attached to the Safe Port Act and signed into effect by President George W. Bush, the UIGEA “prohibits gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of the Internet and that is unlawful under any federal or state law.”

This confusing language does not explicitly state that online gambling is illegal. The UIGEA’s main function has been to prevent US banks from accepting online gambling-related transactions.

Because there are other ways to make internet gaming transactions that don’t require banks Bitcoin, credit cards, and eWallets, many online casinos still offer real money video poker to American players.

Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, and Washington have laws in place to discourage online gaming. For this reason, internet casinos avoid offering video poker to some or all of these states.

But the majority of states have no laws in place regarding online video poker and other forms of gaming.

Video poker is one of our favorite games in any casino. That’s because it offers us the opportunity to take some control over our destiny and affect the odds in our favor. Also, most of these games offer a low house edge compared to other games in the casino.

We enjoy the transparency of this game. Slot machines are too opaque. You don’t have any way of determining whether you’re playing a mathematically generous game or not. We think it’s much better to know exactly what kind of gambling a casino is offering.

We have a large number of pages devoted to video poker on this site. That’s because it’s a fascinating subject, and we want to cover it in as much detail as possible. Since discriminating gamblers almost always choose video poker over slots, we think it’s only fair to accommodate them.