It's the granddaddy of all the video-poker games and, in the estimation of many players and experts alike, Jacks-or-Better video poker is still the best and brightest game to play if you want to have a shot at long-term wins. The best Jacks-or-Better machines return between 99.5 and 99.85 percent and seme even go over the 100 percent payback threshold. The game is also attractive because it is not quite as volatile as the other forms of video poker.

Volatility in video-poker terminology just means long stretches of losing punctuated by explosive winning sessions. Jacks-or-Better is a little smoother than these other varieties. Of course, like all video-poker machines, you will experience more losing sessions than winning sessions since you must factor in that 40,000-to-one royal flush in determining the payback percentage.

My personal experience, for what it's worth, indicates that on the days when I've received one or more four-of-a-kind hands, those were my winning days. So four-of-a-kind has become a bellwether for me, and in Jacks-or-Better you can expect four-of-a kind to appear approximately once every 425 hands. If we assume a four-hour playing day (divided up into any number of sessions you want), with one hand every 20 seconds or so, you can expect to play in the vicinity of 720 hands. It would not be unusual to receive one, two or three four-of-a-kinds in that number of hands. (It also wouldn't be unheard of to receive none.)

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A slot machine is simple. You place your coins in and either push a button or pull a handle. The reels spin and a decision is rendered. Then you repeat the procedure. However, video poker is somewhat more complicated because the player interacts with the machine and where there's human choice, there can be human mistakes. So a wise player should know the mechanics of play as well as the strategies for play. You want to play in a smooth, swift, yet unhurried and unharried manner. Your mechanics should be perfect because a mistake could cost you money.

Step One: You put your coin or coins in. If you are playing full coin, then the machine will automatically deal you your initial hand. However, if you are playing less than full coin, you must hit the DEAL-DRAW button for the machine to deal the initial hand.
Step Two: You now analyze your hand. You will have to make one of the following choices: A.) Keep all the cards because you have a pat hand, or b.) discard all the cards because you have garbage, or c.) discard some cards and keep others.
To keep all the cards, you press the HOLD button under each card. Then you hit the DEAL-DRAW button. Since nothing is being dealt, the machine will record your win and either pay you or give you CREDITS.

To discard all cards, you simply hit the DEAL-DRAW button and all the cards will be replaced with new cards. If your new hand is a winner, the machine will record your win and either pay you or give you CREDITS.

To discard some cards and keep others, you press the HOLD button under the cards you wish to keep and then press DEAL-DRAW to replace the cards you wish to get rid of. These cards will be replaced and the machine will record your win (if you won) and either pay you or give you CREDITS. The key to success at video poker is to know what cards to hold and what cards to throw away.

Cautions: Make sure that when you hold a card that the word HELD lights up under the card. Sometimes the machine doesn't register your press of the HOLD button—for whatever reason. So you'll just have to press it again. Otherwise you'll discard the card when you hit DEAL-DRAW. If you do get a pat hand, do not think the machine registers it automatically. It doesn't. You must press HOLD for each card. Imagine getting a full house, four of a kind, a straight flush or, God forbid, a royal flush only to forget to hit HOLD for each card… frightening thought. But it does happen. I heard one story where a husband and wife were playing together at the Mirage in Las Vegas. The wife hit a wild-card royal and the husband was so excited that before she could hit the HOLD button under each card, he had reached over and hit DEAL-DRAW. The wild-card royal vanished to be replaced with nothing. The wife paused slightly to digest the happening, turned to her husband, who was described by the security guard as "a big, strapping guy," and slugged him right in the mouth.

So the mechanics of your play must include checking to see if the HELD sign lights up under the cards you are keeping before you hit the DEAL-DRAW button—either that or have a very forgiving wife.

Also, if you are playing coins and saving up credits, make sure you actually cash out your credits before you go. I know of cases where people didn't do this and left the machine thinking they hadn't won anything. This can happen because most video-poker machines automatically record your win as a CREDIT and you must press the CASH OUT button for the money to fall into the tray. I benefited from this recently at the Rio in Las Vegas. I went to a machine and as I was putting my coins in, I noticed that the credit light was flashing. I looked at the screen and there were 20 coins in credit on that machine. The person who had played the machine before me had evidently left, leaving behind a win for me. From my observations, the majority of people who leave their credits in the machine tend to be casual players who have just put a few coins in and then don't realize they have won. Often these people are strollers, ambling through the slot aisles, putting in coins and then not taking their credits. Of course, their loss can be someone else's gain.
In Vegas there's a man known as "Rat Tails," so dubbed because of his greasy hair that hangs, well, like rat tails over his shoulders. He also has a somewhat bug-eyed look. His appearance is rather reminiscent of the Pardoner's from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He usually works downtown where his unkempt appearance doesn't look so out of place. Occasionally, he can be found on the Strip. He is not a thief, for what he does is not illegal. He is a roamer. And scavenger. He roams the slot aisles looking for machines whose CREDITS have not been cashed out, or whose trays have a few coins that have been overlooked by patrons. He also checks the floors for coins, "particularly those lush places where the coins blend into the carpeting." This is how he makes his daily bread—or, rather, daily bottle—for he frequents his own version of "lush places" to spend his hard-found coin.

"I find a lot of quarters left behind," he says. "Sometimes you find dollar coins but mostly it's quarters. The quarters sometimes are sitting up against the wall of the tray and the person missed it when he took his coins. I find credits too, usually late at night on the weekends when people have had a little too much to drink. On the floor too. You'd be surprised how much money is just sitting on the casino floor. So I always walk with my head down."

He claims he makes "anywhere from $20 on weekdays to $100 a day on weekends." However, it isn't all fun for Mr. Rat Tails. "I work a full day mostly. I think of it as a job. I can probably tell you what kind of carpet is in what casino.

If they had a game show like Match the Carpet to the Casino, I'd be a winner."
Is the finding of credits or coins in trays or on the floor so unusual? One security guard at Caesars Palace told me that on a weekend night "you could walk from one end of the casino to the other and probably find $50 worth of coins on the carpet. Then come back in a couple of hours and find $50 more."

So keep a close tab on your CREDITS and your coins.
Another caution is in order here as well. Many books and articles on video poker extol the virtue of speed in the playing of video-poker hands—on full-payback machines, that is. Since the player has a long-term edge (or an even game) which will materialize over time, the more hands played, the better the chances for a royal flush and ultimate victory. While this is theoretically true, the old adage that "haste makes waste" applies to video poker. You want to play with speed, certainly. But there's a difference between playing smoothly and with speed and playing hurriedly. The latter will inevitably lead to mistakes that you can ill afford to make; mistakes that will, in the long run, lead to a diminishing of your edge. Just as a good golfer or tennis player concerns himself with the mechanics of his game, so too must a good video-poker player. If a slight reduction in your speed simultaneously reduces your frequency of mistakes, then you are helping yourself in the long run. In video poker speed sometimes kills.

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Video-poker hands are ranked the same way as hands in regular poker. The following list of hands is from the highest ranking to the lowest ranking.

Royal Flush: 10, jack, queen, king, ace of the same suit.
Straight Flush: Any five cards of the same suit in sequence. Example: three, four, five, six, and seven of diamonds.

Four of a Kind: Four cards of the same type. Example: four nines.
Full House: Three of a kind and two of a kind. Example: three jacks, two aces.
Flush: Any five cards of the same suit not in sequence. Example: two, four, eight, nine and ace of spades.

Straight: Five cards in sequence not of the same suit. Example: eight of hearts, nine of clubs, ten of diamonds, jack of spades, queen of spades.

Three of a Kind: Three cards of the same rank. Example: three aces.
Two Pair: Two cards of one rank and two cards of another rank. Example: two tens and two queens.
One Pair: Two cards of the same rank. Example: two nines.
High Card: The order of ranking for the cards from highest to lowest is: ace, king, queen, jack, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

Once you know the ranking of the hands, you should be familiar with the types of draws you can make. Other than discarding cards in order to draw to a pair, two pairs, three-of-a-kind, or a flush, you will be drawing to various straights and straight flushes. These types of hands come in two categories, those that require an inside draw and those require an outside draw. If you have four cards to the following straight—eight, nine, jack, queen, and two—you would discard the two and draw to the other four, hoping to get the ten. This is an inside draw because the card you need fits inside the sequence.

An outside draw would occur when you have nine, ten, jack, queen and two. You would discard the two and hope for one card to fit either outside end of the sequence. Sometimes this is referred to as an open draw because the ends of the draw are open. (Gambling terminology is nothing if not logical!) Thus, if you have an open-ended straight it means that either end is open for a card. Likewise a double-inside draw would be an attempt to draw two inside cards to make a straight or a straight flush. When you are looking over the strategies in the upcoming chapters be aware that straights and flushes are often divided up based on how many inside draws are needed. If the strategy doesn't specify any particular inside or outside draw, you can assume that either is the preferred strategy. Thus, you would draw to the straight or straight flush whether it's an outside or an inside one.

What every video-poker player hopes for are the "no-brainer" hands that are automatic winners. These are hands that don't require any decision making on the part of the player because they are rarely broken up. The following is a list of such "pat" hands. If you receive them on your first five cards, simply keep all your cards by hitting the HOLD button and then the DEAL-DRAW button.

However, sometimes even pat hands have to be broken in order to go for the money. Thus, in the strategies that follow I will note on what occasions you should break a pat hand. In general such an eventuality occurs when you have four cards to a royal flush with a fifth card of the same suit (a flush) or you have a straight made with a fifth card not of the same suit. Despite the fact that you have a winner, you would discard the "fifth" card and go for the better hand.

But first, the ranking of the "pat hands" is as follows:
Royal Flush Straight Flush Four of a Kind Full House Flush Straight

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Although video poker and regular poker share much of the same terminology and many of the same concepts, they are radically different games. In poker you are competing against other players and even strong hands can lose if the player playing those hands is weak or if someone else has a better hand. Likewise, a player with a garbage hand can bluff his opponents into submission and steal the pot. Poker is a game that combines psychology, probability, and luck. It's the gambling equivalent of real mortal combat. Now, while psychology certainly plays a part in all forms of gambling, in poker you are as concerned with your opponents' psychology as you are with your own. True, you must know yourself, but it is just as important to know your opponents.

On the other hand, video poker is a game played against the probabilities programmed in a machine. A good hand in video poker always wins whatever the stipulated amount is. You can't be beaten by a better hand. (Okay, a player could conceivably discard a good hand by accident and wind up a loser.) You are not playing against other players. You are not in a battle of wills and cunning with your fellow human beings. There is no trickery, no combat psychology, no human interaction. The winning combinations are set in stone, so to speak. You can't bluff or con a machine. But still—you can beat that machine.

In that sense your psychology certainly does play a part. To beat the video-poker machine, you must be prepared to play only the very best strategies and these only on the very best machines. You must prepare yourself for the streaky nature of video poker. There are 1-o-n-g s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s where you will lose and lose and lose—even on the very best machines and with the very best strategies. In fact, in all likelihood you will lose more sessions at video poker than you will win because that is the nature of the game.
The above bears repeating, so write it on the tablets of your heart: you will lose more sessions than you will win because that is the nature of the game. You have to be psychologically prepared for this. Video poker is a game of DOWNS and UPS. More DOWNS. Fewer UPS. But on the right machines, that is, 100 percent or more payback machines, and in the long run, your "fewer UPS" will generate much more income than your "more DOWNS" will lose and thus you'll come out ahead.

This phenomenon is caused by the fact that the jackpot for a royal flush must be factored into the percentages of a machine for determining its playability. A natural royal flush (no wild cards or jokers) occurs approximately once in every 40,000 hands if we use the Jacks or Better machine as the model. It's usually a long time coming. But when it comes, it can push the player from the red into the black. Of course, just because the probability of a natural royal flush is a one-in-40,000 chance doesn't mean that it will necessarily come up that way in the real world. Chance itself is streaky and events sometimes bunch up or elongate. It's unpredictable. You might hit a lucky streak where you get several natural royals in several hundred or thousand hands. You also might hit a cold streak where you play for years and years, hundreds of thousands of hands, and don't get a single one. I know people who seem to have gotten an unbelievable share of royals in the past two years. I also know people who have not gotten a single one. The latter situation can be disheartening to say the least.

Of course, no number of natural royal flushes can make you a theoretical long-term winner on negative-expectation machines. If the machine is returning less than 100 percent, then you can expect in the long run to lose whatever percentage hold that machine has. However, machines that range from 99 percent payback to 99.9 percent payback can be beaten if you factor in comps for your play. The little you lose can be more than made up by the perks the casino is willing to give you for your play.

Again, in the real world even negative-expectation devices do have some lucky players. You'll meet one such player in Chapter Twelve who has hit so many jackpots and received so many comps from Atlantic City casinos that she will be hard pressed to give it all back. This despite the fact that she plays mostly negative-expectation machines (or worse, rigged machines!). The real world and the world of theory sometimes diverge.

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In reality, video-poker machines are slot machines but they are slot machines of a very special sort. Like regular slots, the random-number generator (or dealer-in-the-machine) selects the sequences at random and these sequences correspond to the symbols that will be displayed for the players. In the case of video poker, these sequences or symbols will be displayed by card values. However, unlike regular slot machines, the video-poker machine is easily readable and the player can determine exactly what the percentage payback is on the type of machine he wishes to play. The video-poker player can ascertain if he is playing a machine that pays 96 percent of all the money put in it, or 98 percent, or even a hundred percent or more. The slot player has no such knowledge. He doesn't know whether he's playing a 99 percent return machine or an 83 percent return machine because these values are hidden in the programming of the machine. There is no method in slots for analyzing the type of machine you are playing vis-a-vis the casino edge.

Not so with a video-poker machine. Assuming honesty in programming, the video-poker player knows exactly what the odds are that he faces for any given hand, since these odds are based on a 52-card deck or, in the case of games with jokers, decks of 53 or more cards. The video-poker player also knows exactly what percentage edge the casino has over him or what edge he has over the casino since this can be determined by analyzing the payoff schedule printed prominently on the face of the machine. The casino's or player's edge is determined by the amount of the payoffs for the various hands—always assuming that the player is using the correct strategies for the machine he is playing and that the machine is dealing an honest game.

This is a radical departure from traditional slots where most everything is a great unknown. Yes, the slot player knows that if he lines up certain symbols, he'll be paid a certain amount of money, but what he doesn't know is the frequency of these symbols' appearance. Without such knowledge the slot player cannot determine the nature of the risk he is taking when playing any given machine. Thankfully, slot players can now make a strong, educated guess as to which machines are loose and which are tight by using the revelations made in my book Break the One-Armed Bandits! concerning their placement in the casino. In addition, slot players have an excellent chance of finding and distinguishing which of several machines would be loose or tight in relation to each other by following the advice I gave in my newsletter Chance and Circumstance ("Slot Revelation: Using the Casinos' Computers Against Them," $15, Paone Press, Box 610, Lynbrook, NY 11563). Still the most astute slot player cannot know with certainty the exact percentages he faces on all machines and kinds of games as can a video-poker player. The slot player must resort to cleverness and outside information to ferret out good machines. The video-poker player merely has to understand how to read the machine's chart.

Thus, there is no secret to which video-poker machines are "loose" and which are "tight" as there is with traditional slots. That's because the loose and tight machines can be distinguished rather easily. With the proper playing strategies, the loose machines can be beaten by the player. Naturally, the tight machines far outweigh the loose ones in the land of video poker, but that's the way of it in the casino world. The casinos are not in the business of making it easy for the patron to win. Their mission is to make it easy for you to lose and even easier for you to actually enjoy losing. Luckily, the astute player doesn't have to join the chorus in this choir of the lost because he can select his machines carefully and be confident that he has a damn good shot at the casino's money. In video poker the player can get the best of it. Indeed, in Nevada you will find a great many machines that are worth playing and it's a dollar-wise but pound-foolish player who selects video poker as his game and then doesn't play the best machines and the best strategies.

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The majority of video-poker machines in the past had parallel dealing. A parallel machine is one where the cards are dealt with their replacements already selected and in place "behind" the displayed card. Thus, if you received a card that you didn't want and discarded it, the card that replaced it would have been sitting there all along. In a real card game, the replacement card would not have already been dealt. Instead, the replacements are made in the order of discard and off the top of the deck.

The first card discarded would receive the first card off the top of the deck, the second card discarded would receive the second card off the top of the deck and so forth until all discards had been replaced with new cards. Some of the newer machines employ this kind of serial dealing—just as a regular card game would. In either case, if the game is dealt fairly and the microchip isn't programmed to avoid certain hands, the video-poker player can be confident in employing the strategies discussed in this book for the machine he selects to play. The type of deal has little impact on the long-range prospects of the skillful player.

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Sitting inside every video-poker or video-blackjack machine is a dealer. Just as in any card game played in a casino, the dealer shuffles the cards, deals the cards, collects the discards and determines who gets paid when the hand is completed. The dealer is (or should be) uninterested in who wins or loses, as his job is only to shuffle and deal and collect those cards—and keep the game moving.

However, the dealer-in-the-machine is of a very special and particular kind that sets him far apart from his human counterpart in the casino poker rooms. The dealer-in-the-machine never gets tired. Also, he rarely makes a mistake. When he senses that he isn't up to par, he can shut himself down and signal for help. That's because the dealer-in-the-machine is a microchip that has been programmed to select a series of random numbers. These numbers correspond to the various cards being used and the sequences of numbers will correspond to various hands that will be dealt. In games that are not rigged, the cards will be shuffled at random and dealt as they come off the top of the deck. Thus, the first number sequence will be the first card, the second number sequence will be the second card and so forth. Just as a human dealer would do. In theory and sans cheating, each card will have the same chance of coming up as every other card in the deck or as every other card in the remaining portion of the deck.

Another interesting difference between a human dealer and the dealer-in-the-machine is the fact that the dealer-in-the-machine is constantly selecting number sequences—even when the machine isn't being played! In this frenetic solitaire, the dealer-in-the-machine is selecting, arranging, and discarding, selecting, arranging, and discarding numbers upon numbers, sequences upon sequences, cards after cards, hands after hands, as he waits for some player to ante up.

Once the player antes up—that is, puts his coins in the machine—the dealer-in-the-machine signals the video-display portion of the device that thus and such cards will come up in this and that order. And the game is on. The player will now make his choices of keeping or drawing some cards, all cards or no cards. The player does this by pushing the DEAL-DRAW button on the console.

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