Joker Poker is a video poker tournament that’s also sometimes called “Joker Wild.” Almost all VP (video poker) games are just variations of Jacks or Better, and Joker Poker is no exception. The difference between it and Jacks or Better boils down to the inclusion of a wild card — the joker.
Joker Poker is played with a virtual 53-card deck instead of a 52-card deck. The pay joker123 is changed to compensate for the greater likelihood of a high-ranking hand.
This post includes everything you need to know to play Joker Poker.
The Basics of Joker Poker
Nearly all video poker games obey the same format, including Joker Poker. You insert money, and it’s converted into credits based on the denomination of the machine.
For Example:
If you’re playing on a quarter ($0.25) machine and insert $100, you have 400 credits.
That same $100 would only be 100 credits on a dollar machine.
You then decide how numerous credits you want to risk on a hand. You can choose between 1 and 5 credits, but you should ALWAYS choose 5 credits. The reason for this is simple but not readily important.
The top jackpot in any videotape poker tournament is a royal flush — the 10, jack, queen, king, and ace of a single suit.
That hand pays off at 200 for 1, with one exception.
If you’ve played for 5 recognition, you get an 800 for 1 payout for a royal flush. That’s a big enough difference in your payout to have a major effect on your payback percentage for the game.
We should talk about payback percentage before we go much further, too.
When you discuss a casino game, it has a house edge and a payback percentage. People usually talk about the house edge when they’re discussing a table game; they talk about a payback percentage when they’re ufa about a gambling machine.
They’re like two flanks of the exact coin. In fact, if you add the house edge and the vengeance quota together, the result is always 100%.
The house rim is the statistical advantage the casino has over the player, expressed as a percentage of each bet that the casino expects to win over the long run.
The payback percentage is the amount of money that the casino statistically expects to pay back on each bet.
If we say that a casino game has a house edge of 1%, then that means that the odds and payouts create a situation where the casino expects to win $1 for every $100 you bet. But that’s an average amount over a huge number of trials. In the short run, anything can occur.
If we say that a casino game carries a payback percentage of 99%, then that means that every time you bet $100, the casino expects to pay you $99 back in winnings. This, too, is a statistical average.
Your goal when playing any game where the casino has an edge is to keep that edge as small as possible, which is the same thing as keeping the payback percentage as high as possible.
So it makes sense to always make the bet that offers you the biggest payback percentage, everything else being equal.
The probability of getting a royal flush is always small. You’ll only see that hand once every 40,000 hands or so, even with the wild card. That’s because a wild royal flush doesn’t pay out the same as a real royal color.
Anyway, always bet 5 coins.
Once you’ve chosen your wager size, the Joker Poker machine “deals” you a five-card hand. You can choose to keep or discard each card in your hand, which gives you a total of 32 possible ways to play each hand, varying from keeping all five cards to discarding all five cards and everything in between.
Each way of playing a hand offers an expected return. This is the probability of each hand that you might wind up with multiplied by the payout for that hand. This makes Joker Poker a game of skill as well as a game of chance. The more mistakes you make in your strategy, the lower the payback percentage for the game is.
After you’ve chosen which cards to keep and which ones to throw away, the machine deals you replacement cards and pays you off based on the pay table for the game. That pay table is based on the standard ranking of poker hands.
Conclusion
Learning how to play Joker Poker is dead easy if you have any experience playing Jacks or Better or other video poker games. If you’re brand new to VP games, you can probably still get to where you need to be quickly with the guide in this post.
I like Joker Poker because it’s a nice midway point between Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, which has four wild cards. The inclusion of the wild cards changes the game, but since Joker Poker only includes one, it’s not as drastic a strategic change.