VIDEO POKER

Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. It is played on a computerized console similar in size to a slot machine.

The Game

Game play begins by placing a bet of one or more credits, by inserting money into the machine, and then pressing a "Deal" button to draw cards. The player is then given an opportunity to keep or discard one or more of the cards in exchange for a new card drawn from the same virtual deck. After the draw, the machine evaluates the hand and offers a payout if the hand matches one of the winning hands in the posted pay schedule.

On a typical video poker machine, payouts start with a minimum hand of a pair of jacks. Pay tables allocate the payout for hands based partially upon how rare they are, and also based upon the total theoretical return the game operator chooses to offer. 

Some machines offer progressive jackpots for the royal flush, , thereby spurring players to both play more coins and to play more frequently.

Regulation

Video poker machines operated in state-regulated jurisdictions are programmed to deal random card sequences. A series of cards is generated for each play; five dealt straight to the hand, the other five dealt in order if requested by player. This is based upon a Nevada regulation, adopted by most other states with a gaming authority, which requires dice and cards used in an electronic game to be as random as the real thing, within computational limits set by the gaming authority. Video poker machines are tested to ensure compliance with this requirement before they may be offered to the public. Video poker games in Nevada are required to simulate a 52 card deck .

It is unclear whether all video poker machines at Indian gaming establishments are subject to the same Nevada-style regulations, as Indian casinos are located on reservations that are sovereign to the tribe which holds the gaming license.

Newer versions of the software no longer deal out all 10 cards at once. They now deal out the first five cards, and then when the draw button is pressed, they generate a second set of cards based on the remaining 47 cards in the deck. This was done after players found a way to reverse engineer a random number generator's cycle from sample hands and were able to predict the hidden cards in advance.

Kinds of video poker

Newer video poker machines may employ variants of the basic five-card draw. Typical variations include Deuces Wild, where a two serves as a wild card and a jackpot is paid for four deuces or a natural royal; pay schedule modification, where four aces with a five or smaller kicker pays an enhanced amount ; and multi-play poker, where the player starts with a base hand of five cards, and each additional played hand draws from a different set of cards with the base hand removed. 

In the non-wild games a player who plays five or six hundred hands per hour, on average, may receive the rare four-of-a-kind approximately once per hour, while a player may play for many days or weeks before receiving an extremely rare royal flush.

Full pay games

Full pay video poker machines are games which offer the typical maximum payback percentage for that game type. Payback percentage expresses the long-term expected value of the player's wager as a percentage. A payback percentage of 99 percent, for instance, indicates that for each $100 wagered, in the long run, the player would expect to lose $1. Payback percentages on full-pay games are often close to or even in excess of 100 percent, assuming error-free perfect play.

Full-pay Jacks or Better, for example, offers a payback percentage of 99.54 percent when played with perfect strategy. It must be remembered that winning the jackpot  is also part of the "long run" in every variant. One should not play a "full pay" video poker game expecting not to lose, because even over many thousands of hands played, you are playing a game that pays back less than 100%.

Casinos often place full pay machines alongside other machines with pay schedules that offer less attractive payback percentages, leaving it up to the player to identify which video poker machines offer full pay schedules.

Most full pay machines are configured with a pay schedule that is only full pay when the maximum number of credits is bet.