One good thing about video poker in this Video Poker Guide is that you get to know the machine’s feedback even before you start playing. In a typical video poker game, the average casino profit on each move is about 3%. This is called the house advantage . The return is the park that is returned to the player.
So if the casino takes 3% of all money wagered, players get back 97% of all money wagered. The payoff at a video poker machine is determined by the paytable.
Just compare the paytable with the list in the wild of odds and you will see, for example, the Jacks or Better paytable above means that the return on this machine is 99.54%. If the paytable showed only 8 coins for Full House and only 5 for Flush, that would be a 97.3% machine.
Compare this to slot machines, where you have no idea what kind of payout you are getting. And even if the return was listed, it would suck. The slot machine is the only game in the casino where your odds are utter misery. Why would I let the casino do that? Play video poker instead.
Immediately after learning proper strategy, the most important thing in this Video Poker Guide to playing video poker is to choose a machine with a good paytable!
Here are some pictures I just took at the same casino, same game style, same denomination. The only thing that’s different is payments. The first pays 9 & 6 for Full House and Flush respectively, and the second only pays 8 & 5 for those hands.
99.54% return
97.29% return
If you choose the machine on the right, you will lose your money six times faster!
And your chances of winning will be much smaller. If the reason isn’t obvious then consider this:
If the player is getting back 99.54% and 97.29%, that means the casino is keeping 0.46% and 2.71%. The casino’s profit on the second machine is 2.71 / 0.46 = 5.9 times greater.
So it’s really worth looking for the good machines! But it’s actually pretty easy, because readers of a website called VPFree2 look for the best machines and put their locations on the site. Using this site you can see that there are 9/6 Jacks or Better machines in the various locations.
Despite the importance of finding the best machines, most players don’t. That’s why casinos can offer both decent and lousy machines in the same casino and have confidence that players will still play the worst.
They have to keep some good machines, otherwise they would lose all the players who know what they are doing. But most machines will be bad, and most players will play them anyway.
Hell, in Vegas even the casinos and supermarkets have video poker, with absolutely terrible paytables, but people will still continue to gamble on them instead of crossing the street to a casino where they can have seven times better odds. Go there and understand.