Your Video Poker Library

In previous columns we've looked at the poker library and the blackjack library. The other beatable casino game is video poker--the subject of this column.

Guess what? Due to competition and other factors, there are actually video poker machines that payout more than 100% of the dollars wagered--with perfect play. Combined with slot club premiums such as cash back, the amount can be well in excess of 100%. The catch is that most people don't know how to recognize such machines, and even if they do they don't know how to play well enough to take advantage of the high payouts.

It is possible to learn how to recognize these high paying machines (many of which are sitting right next to poor paying machines) and how to play them perfectly.

In most jurisdictions, video poker machines are required to be exactly what they purport to be. A game that purports to be dealt from a 52 card deck, must be actually dealt from one. A game, such as Joker's Wild, is dealt from a 53 card deck. Furthermore, each machine displays its payback schedule. Given the deck composition, and the payback schedule it is possible to determine the best way to play a particular hand to maximize your advantage, as well as the total payback of a particular machine. This can be tedious, but the good news is that others have done the work for you (for most machines) and have made their results available to others.

By way of complete disclosure, I need to tell you that one of the best and most accessible books on the market is published by my company, ConJelCo. It is Dan Paymar's Video Poker--Optimum Play (ISBN 1-886070-11-3), $19.95. This paperback focusses on three very popular games: 1) Jacks-or-Better, Deuces Wild, and Joker Wild. Paymar's thesis is that perfect play is a very hard to achieve goal for most people and that they can achieve most of the payback of a particular machine by following a simplified set of rules--his optimum play rules. Dan also publishes a newsletter, Video Poker Times, to keep you up-to-date on video poker developments.

Bob Dancer is another professional who writes about video poker. He has published a set of "Video Poker for Winners Reports" including one on 9-6 Jacks or Better, one on Deuces Wild, and one on 10/7 Double Bonus. These slim books (the largest is less than 50 pages) sell for $10 each and contain a wealth of information about the game that they cover. Like Paymar, Dancer believes that you can get a lot of the payback from a video poker machine by playing simplified strategies. He provides a "quick and dirty" strategy, an "intermediate" strategy and a "professional" strategy for the game covered.

Stanford Wong was among the first to recognize the possibilities of beating video poker. I'm told that he exploited some of the high pay-out machines long before others recognized the possiblities. His Professional Video Poker, (ISBN 0-935926-15-1), $14.95 covers the Jacks-or-Better game thoroughly and presents a fairly easy to remember strategy.

Of course, no article about video poker would be complete without a mention of the late Lenny Frome, who analyzed a wide variety of games (and wrote about them in Card Player for many years.) His Winning Strategies in Video Poker, (ISBN-0-962376-63-9, $15.95 covers more games than all of the other books combined.

Other items that belong in your video poker arsenal are the cards published by various professionals. These provide available-at-the- machine advice on the correct strategy for virtually any situation. Recommended sets are those by Dan Paymar, Bob Dancer, and Jazbo Burns.

The serious player will also want software to practice, refine strategies when new payouts are encountered, etc. I intend to do a comprehensive software article in the future, but readers of this column might want to pick up Video Poker Freebie, a free windows program, from www.conjelco.com/vpfreeb ie.html.

Best wishes for a happy and safe Y2K.