Promises Every Video Poker Gambler Needs to Make and Keep

Video poker games can be very good for gamblers or worse than most other games in the casino. It all depends on the pay tables and how you play your hands.

If you make the 6 promises listed in this article and follow through on them you’re going to be getting better results from video poker machines than other gamblers. In fact, you’re going to be playing with the lowest house edge possible.

Just make a promise to yourself that you’re going to do each of the 6 things listed below and you can get started today.

You Won’t Play With Crappy Pay Tables

Bad pay tables are the single thing that makes some video poker machines unplayable. In fact, if a video poker game doesn’t have a good pay table you need to make a promise that you’re not going to play on the machine.

Exactly two things dictate the return you get when you play real money video poker. The first thing is the pa table, and the second thing is how you play, which you’re going to learn about in the next section.

The return on the same type of video poker game can be over 99% with 1 pay table and under 95% with a different pay table. This is over 4%, which means that you’re going to lose at least an extra $4 for every $100 that you risk on the machine. And it doesn’t take long at all to rack up $100 worth of wagers playing video poker.

In order for you to avoid playing video poker on a machine with a crappy pay table you have to know which pay tables are good and which tables are bad. This means that you need to do some research about the game you want to play before you start looking for machine.

You Won’t Play Without Using Strategy

The other part of playing video poker with the highest return that you can get is how you play every hand. Every video poker hand has a single best way to play it. If you ever play a hand the wrong way, even a single time, it’s costing you money by lowering your long term return.

You have to make a promise to yourself right now that you’re going to learn what the best strategy is for every video poker machine that you play and that you’re going to use this strategy on every hand you play.

If you’re not going to make the 2 promises in these first 2 sections and follow through on them you should stop playing video poker.

On the other hand, when you make these 2 promises and follow through on them you’re going to get the maximum return every time you play video poker. And the maximum return on good video poker games is often the best return available in the casino.

The only competition for return in most casinos to good video poker games is blackjack. A blackjack game with good rules can offer a slightly better return than a good video poker game, but you have to use perfect strategy when you play it also.

You Always Know the Rules

This might seem like a common sense thing, but you have to know the rules for every video poker game you play. This includes how the game is played and what hands pay what amounts.

This is also important because of the different returns for betting different coin amounts. When you gamble the best strategy is almost always to risk the smallest amount that you can. But this isn’t true on most video poker machines.

In fact, the best strategy when you’re playing most video poker games is to bet the maximum number of coins, which are usually 5 coins.

This doesn’t mean that the best strategy is to play on the machine that costs the most. Video poker machines assign a value to each coin, and you’re better off playing 5 coins on a machine with the lowest coin value as long as the pay table is good.

You Don’t Play Like a Speed Demon

Even if you make all of the promises about video poker that I just covered and follow through on them, you’re going to be playing a game that has a return that doesn’t quite reach 100%. This means that you’re losing a small percentage of the money you risk.

When you’re gambling and losing a small percentage of what you risk you need to try to find ways to reduce the total amount that you’re risking. The best way to do this when you play video poker, other than finding machines with low coin values, is to play slower.

I’ve been guilty of this many times, so I know how damaging it can be. You can get in a rhythm and play video poker as fast as you can push the buttons. This can end up being 500 or more hands every hour. This is risking the maximum amount of money every hour.

But you get to choose how many hands you play of video poker every hour. If you cut your play in half by simply slowing down a little, you effectively cut your losses in half.

I’ve found that when I slow down my video poker play a little it also helps me avoid making mistakes. This gives me a double bonus of reducing the total amount I risk and lowering my losses from mistakes.

You Know a Good Bonus When You See It

Some online and mobile casinos that offer video poker games also offer bonuses for video poker. Not every casino offers video poker bonuses, and some of them that do don’t offer good video poker bonuses.

Here’s how to determine if a video poker bonus is good or bad:

• The first thing you need to find out is if you can cash the bonus out after you clear it. If you can cash the remaining bonus out after clearing it you can move to the next step. If you can’t cash it out, it’s not a good bonus.
• The other way to tell if a video poker bonus is good is to see how much you have to risk clearing it. This information is in the terms and conditions.

Take the total amount you have to risk and multiply it by .5%. If this is bigger than the amount of the bonus it’s not a good bonus. If it’s equal to or less than the bonus amount, it’s a good bonus.

You’re Going to Get Comps

You just learned about video poker bonuses in the last section, which deals with online and mobile video poker play. But if you play video poker in a land based casino you’re not going to be able to get a bonus. However, you can get something else that can help with your losses.

Most land based casinos that offer video poker games offer their players comps through a players club of some sort.

Basically you sign up and the casino tracks how much money you bet playing video poker. The casino gives you back a small percentage of the amount you play. This is like getting free money or merchandise or services for doing something that you were planning to do anyway.

The 2 important things to understand about comps and video poker are that they’re never going to be quite enough to erase all of your losses and they’re rarely in the form of cash. Instead you earn things like free food at the buffet or entry into special contests and tournaments.

The important thing to realize is that you should be getting comps for every hand of video poker you play in a land based casino. If the casino doesn’t offer a video poker comps program you should play at a different casino.

Conclusion

The worst thing you can do as a video poker gambler is play on a machine that has a bad pay table. The second worst thing you can do is play without using strategy. You need to make a promise right now that you’re never going to do either of these things.

You also need to make sure you know the rules and which hands pay which amounts for every machine that you play. When you do these things, control how fast you play, get comps, and find good video poker bonuses you’re doing everything you can to win.