Always Play Five Coins
To achieve the absolute best odds at the video poker machine, five coins must be played. At first glance, this suggestion probably strikes you as being strange and you may think that this may cost you a lot. Why not one coin or two? After all, the payoffs on all hands at the video poker machine are proportionately the same whether one, two, three, four or five coins are played.
However, there's one glaring exception, the royal flush. And though the royal flush doesn't come often, it does get hit and of course you always want to hope for the best. Keep in mind that this is not a regular poker game where you may never see a royal flush, it is video poker where you play an entirely different strategy than the regular table game. You're strategy is focused on the big score, the royal flush.
In a regular poker game, your primary goal is simply to win the hand, even if a pair of 5's does the trick. There is no extra payoff for winning with a royal flush. You win the money in the pot, whether your hand is a pair of 5's or a royal. In video poker, there is a difference: 5's don't pay anything, but a royal flush has a huge payout.
You'll play hands in video poker that you wouldn't in a regular poker game and vice-versa. The strategies for the two games are entirely different.
Look at a payoff chart for Jacks or Better and notice what happens on the royal flush payoffs. Interesting, yes? One coin played returns 200 coins, two coins yields 400 coins, three coins 600 and four coins brings home 800 bad boys. Well, the progression for the fifth coin should be 1,000 coins if you're following along with the addition.
But it's not. The full payoff on a royal flush with five coins played is 4,000 coins!
That's a nice payoff and it is the reason we're going to play five coins. The royal is not as remote as it seems. As we talked about earlier, you may never see a royal flush in a regular poker game, but at the video poker machines, having a good strategy will definitely give you a chance to land that big fish.
You'll see similar jumps for the royal flush payoffs on most of the video poker machines. Therefore, to collect the full payoff on a royal flush, proper play dictates that you always play the full five coins for each game. For if you do hit the royal flush, there's a big, big difference between 1,000 coins returned and 4,000 coins returned. And on a progressive, the cost of not playing a full five coins will be the progressive itself, which generally cannot bet hit unless all five coins are played.