The very popular video poker game, like online slot machine games, is pretty straightforward to understand. Essentially the player and the machine both act twice. This can of course change if the player gets a winning hand… Read on to get a better idea of how it works.
To start, the player places a bet and hits the deal button. The player then gets five cards facing upwards. Directly underneath each card, a “Hold” button will appear. The player decides which cards he/she would like to keep and selects the “Hold” button underneath them. The wording on the button then changes to “Held”. When the player is done selecting the cards, he/she hits the new big “Deal” button for the machine to replace the cards that were not selected. After the cards are settled, the machine does the calculations and pays the player. If the player wins the game, the machine will give him / her the option to double their money. This is done through a “high card showdown”: The dealer (the machine) deals five cards facing downwards. The machine randomly chooses one card which gets revealed. The player then chooses a card from the remaining four face-down cards. If the player’s card is higher than the machine’s one, the player’s winnings get doubled. This can carry on until the player decides to cash in or until he/she loses, in which case he/she loses all their winnings as well as the original bet.
Some online video poker game machines offer progressive jackpots. This means that they are linked to a group of machines that all contribute to a universal progressive jackpot. These jackpots can grow to large amounts and entice players to play more frequently.
Video Poker Betting
Over the years, video poker betting with variations to the normal five-card draw poker rules has emerged. Amongst the most popular of these games are Deuces Wild, Pay Schedule Modification, and Multi-Play Poker.
Multi-play Poker:
The player starts with a base hand of cards. Every hand thereafter gets drawn from a different set of cards which the base hand gets removed from. These games usually offer “Triple Play”, “Five Play”, “Ten Play”, “Fifty Play” and “One Hundred Play”.
Pay Schedule Modification:
These machines will payout more for 4 Aces and a 5 or smaller kicker and usually have an adjective in the title such as “Double”, etc.
Deuces Wild:
This game can have the 2 as a wild card and jackpots can get paid out for 4 deuces as well as a natural Royal.
Some video poker betting systems do not offer a wild card option. These games known as non-wild games will however produce on average one rare four-of-a-kind hand per hour if it is played between five and six hundred times within that hour. The same machine can take days or even weeks to produce a royal flush.
