What is optimum play in video poker?
Many strategists say optimum play when they really mean perfect play; that is, every play would be made for the highest possible expected value, even if the cost of a simplified play is miniscule. For all attractive video poker games, only a computer would be able to make the absolute best play in every situation.
For some games, we can come very close to the maximum payback with just a few strategy rules. For others, it requires a hand rank table as shown elsewhere in this site for Double Bonus Poker at about 100.15% and All American Poker at about 100.7% payback. Such games seduce some strategists into generating a very detailed strategy with lots of penalty card situations (penalty cards will also be discussed in an upcoming article).
Some “experts” are so concerned about perfection that they generate penalty card situations ad nauseam. I do play video poker quite a bit, and I could learn those complex rules if I wanted to, but it would be a wasted effort. With my strategies I can come within a couple of hundredths of a percent of perfect play, and I can play about 500 to 700 hands per hour. Adding the complexity of all those penalty cards would slow me down, cutting into my expected win rate much more than the potential gain of the better strategy and greatly reducing the fun of playing. For any endeavor, there is a point of diminishing returns.
In the case of a complex video poker game such as All American Poker, you can use a very simplified strategy and play very fast, but you will be giving up a significant part of your potential win rate. Learning a somewhat more accurate strategy will increase your expected per-play gain with little loss of speed, resulting in an increase in your hourly win rate.
A strategy might be developed that would yield very close to the maximum payback, but it would necessarily by quite complicated. Following such a strategy faithfully would increase your per-play expected gain, but considering those penalty card situations would probably slow you down.
Worse, you might make more errors through inadvertent deviations from the strategy and thus have a lower net win rate. Because of the wide difference in the various games and various people, I feel that the term optimum play should be defined as ‘the strategy that will yield the highest per-hour expected win rate for a particular player.’ Note, especially the reference to a particular player.
I don’t know anything about your ability and dedication to be a winning player, so I don’t know exactly what your optimum strategy would be, so let’s examine what I do know. I know that the industry-wide average hold on all video poker games in Nevada is about two percent more than it would be if everyone played perfectly, and the reason is that the vast majority of players play by guesses and hunches instead of learning a good strategy.
Is this due to lack of ability? No, nearly everyone has the ability to learn to be a winner, but most either don’t try because they are in a casino just for fun, knowing that they will most likely loose the money they have brought along to gamble, or they believe that it doesn’t matter how they play because the machines are set to a specific payback.
Contrary to common myth, the machines are random, and in most jurisdictions they are honest, so you can be a winner if you want to. In the previous column I presented simplified versions of my Precision Play rules for Jacks-or-Better Draw Poker and Deuces Wild. While these greatly simplified strategies obviously will not yield the full potential payback of the games, they do come within one or two tenths of one percent.
