When a casino wants to change the long-term payback percentage of a video poker game, it changes the pay table. Although the players get winning hands no more or less frequently that before, they discover that some hands pay a little more or a little less than before.
In Jacks or Better, the base game around which many video poker variations are built, the payoffs that usually changed the most are Full Houses and Flushes. Ideally, video poker players should look for games that pay 9:1 on Full Houses and 6:1 for Flushes, with the full pay table being 250:1 on Royal Flushes (4,000 coins with a five coin wager), 50:1 for Straight Flushes, 25:1 on Four (4) of a Kind, 9:1 on Full Houses, 6:1 on Straight Flushes, 4:1 on Straights, 3:1 on Three (3) of a Kind, 2:1 on two (2) pair, and 1:1 on pairs of Jacks or Better.
For each unit that the pay off on Full Houses or Flushes drops, the player loses 1.1 % of their long-term payback. On an 8/5 Jacks or Better game, with one-unit drops in both spots on the pay table, the average return drops to 97.3% Drop the Full House payback again for 7:1 and it drops to 96.2%
A savvy video poker player would turn his nose up at a 7/5 game. In Vegas or Atlantic City, he might even leave the casino floor and look a better deal next door or down the street. However, this is not an option on riverboats or at Native American casinos. In those cases, it is up to the video poker player to decide whether he wants to bite the bullet and go ahead and play or take up a table game instead. |
