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| ARTICLES >> Video Poker Versus Live Table Poker |
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There is not much of a difference between video poker and live table poker except that in a game of video poker you are playing against the casino and not other players. This means that you can focus on creating the very best highly ranked hands instead of bluffing and guessing what everyone else at the table is holding in their hands.
As in live table poker, video poker deals cards from a standard 52-card deck. The exception is a video poker Joker’s Wild game that uses 53 cards. After being dealt your initial five cards, you must decide which cards to hold and which to discard in an attempt to effect a winning poker hand (or to improve an existing hand that has the potential to win) just as you would playing in a live game. However this is where the similarity ends between live poker and video poker.
Playing video poker is more like playing solitaire. This is because the casino machine is not trying to beat your hand or compete with you in any way. The video game is simply banking the play and nothing more. There are no opponents so figuring out your hand rankings and making decisions about the cards is pretty much a no brainer.
As you are not competing with other players there is no such thing as a losing hand. You can’t lose your Full House to someone else’s Royal Flush. All that happens is that your hand is recorded and then the machine calculates whether or not you qualify for a payout. Of course this means that you must adjust your strategy a little bit to play video poker as some of the decisions that seem like good ideas in a live game do not apply here.
One of the most common mistakes that players make when playing video poker is trying to hold a kicker card or getting rid of an inside straight. These are good plays in live poker but lousy plays in video poker.
As there are no other players, video poker is purer when it comes to expected value of your games. In any casino game, the expected value (of any chance event is the weighted average of all possible outcomes. To determine the expected value of any video poker play you only need to know that there are thirty-two possible ways to play any dealt five-card hand. You can hold all five cards, hold four cards and draw one, hold two cards and draw three, hold three cards and draw two, hold one card and draw four or discard all five cards. In any case, we have seen five of the 52 cards in the deck, so the draw must come from the remaining 47 unseen cards. If you have some familiarity with how you can win knowing this and what hands to play then you can’t lose at video poker. We can also play free bingo online at many websites. |
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