New! I've just started offering a small number of video poker products by other authors: Video Poker-Optimum Play, Bob Dancer Presents WinPoker, and Video Poker Strategy Master. I think each of these products is the "Best of Breed" and well worth your considertaion. More information about them can be found on my description page.
I now have over a dozen varieties of video poker strategy cards, now including Deuces Wild and Double Jokers. Descriptions of the different game can be found following this link. There is also a separate order page that you can keep open while you refer to the individual descriptions.
My specially formatted, laminated strategy cards provide a way to quickly
and easily play "best basic" video poker strategy. Here's an example of
what part of one looks like:
for each possible hand, you just figure the expected value for each possible
way of discarding and choose the best. However, describing an optimal strategy
would take a lot of space and would not really be playable by most people.
A more reasonable approach is to consider a ranking of "holds," the cards
you hold and draw to. For example, for a particular game, we might rank
JTs (the "s" means suited and "T" means 10) above KJ. That
would imply that we should hold JcTc instead of KhJc in the
hand KhJcTc3d2d.
A "basic" strategy is one that ranks holdings, but does not take discards into account. A discard that negatively affects the value of the cards held is called a "penalty card". My "best basic" strategies are designed to be as good as reasonably possible without using penalty card rules. All of my non-wild card strategies with 0.01% of optimal without the need of any penalty rules. Strategies for wild card games often cannot reach this high standard without the use of penalty cards, but I try to keep penalty rules to a bare minimum.
For Video Poker games, the expectation of a given machine is determined
by the "pay table," which indicates the payoffs for different final hands.
To make sure you know which game I am giving strategies for, I indicate
the pay table by a sequence of integers such as: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6,
9, 25, 50, 800.
This give the pay offs for hands from a big pair (Jacks) up through a royal
flush, as follows:
| 1 | Pair of Jacks or Better |
| 2 | Two Pair |
| 3 | Three of a Kind (Trips) |
| 4 | Straight |
| 6 | Flush |
| 9 | Full House |
| 25 | Four of a Kind (Quads) |
| 50 | Straight Flush |
| 800 | Royal Flush |
The pay offs are given in terms of units bet. Normally, to get the full value, you must bet five coins, so a unit is $1.25 on a quarter machine or $5 on a dollar machine. A frequent variation on the pay table is to pay different amounts for different quads. In this case, I give the quad pay offs as a sequence in square brackets like: "[80,50,160]". For all games I am currently offering, the values are for Quads 2-4, Quads 5-K and Quad Aces, respectively.
Comments and questions are welcome. Suggest other VP games you'd like to see, but be warned that it takes quite a while to develop a good strategy and come up with a great format to display it. Just send email to Jazbo.