Play Video Poker Online: Our Top Choices Revealed

The Basics

Most titles in modern online casinos use a touchscreen interface, while older machines rely on physical buttons for interaction. In video poker, you place a bet and are dealt five cards. The game follows the traditional poker hand hierarchy, featuring hands like a pair, two pair, three of a kind, straight, flush, full house, four of a kind, straight flush, and the top hand—a royal flush.

Video poker machines often have relatively low betting limits, similar to slot machines. Bet sizes typically range from nickel and quarter bets to multi-hand high roller machines that can reach hundreds of dollars per round, though most machines fall between a quarter and a few dollars per hand.

During gameplay, you can choose to discard or not discard from your hand to build a better hand. Video poker machines vary, so the winning combinations and payouts for each machine might be different. That information is displayed on a paytable on the machine’s face.

Online Pay Tables

Although all online poker sites offer games like Jacks or Better and Joker Poker (Joker’s Wild), the paytables for these games can vary significantly. Keep the following factors in mind when choosing a game:

• The games at Roaring 21, and Sloto Cash offer a 250x payout for a royal flush instead of a 800x payout. 250x is the payout for a 4-coin jackpot at most Las Vegas Strip video poker machines, so this adds 1% or more to the house edge of the game.
• Some games, like Bonus Poker Deluxe, trade this disadvantage for the advantage of 75x payouts on a straight flush (instead of 50x payouts in many games). It’s not all to a player’s disadvantage.
• When you read online about the great odds offers, these articles refer to full-pay machines that are found in Las Vegas casinos.
• Responsible experts post multiple paytables, but even the experts can’t cover every single version of a game.
• Long story short: an online house edge might not be the same as what you’ve read about.
• In our experience, the paytables at Bovada, and Ignition are closer to what you’ll find in Las Vegas casinos than the other gaming sites on the list.

The table below points the way to the best RTPs for each variant at online casinos in the United States we recommend.

1. Play free online.

Free games are common online. Most provide the option to play for real money. This helps you learn the rules of different titles without risking real money. Don’t go into a casino and play without any experience. Free games are everywhere, so try your hand before you sit in front of the real deal.

2. Study a machine’s payout table.

If you don’t know what a video poker machine will pay for different hands, you don’t know whether or not it’s a good or bad game. One rule of thumb, the more wild cards there are in a title, the harder it is to get to the better casino payouts. You learn things like that by studying payout tables. The games that offer you the best odds have no wild cards at all, and offer payouts starting at just a pair of Jacks or better. Some Deuces Wild games offer positive expectation if played with perfect strategy thanks to the payout table structure. As a counter-example, the popular Joker’s Wild games has the lowest payout on two pair or better, so it is harder to win on Joker’s Wild than a wild card-less game.

3. Bet maximum.

Everyone’s strategy is a little different, but most players agree that maximum bets are always the best play.

There’s an entire type of online real money machines, called a progressive machine, that only pays out the highest jackpots to maximum bets. These machines have different schedules for maximum bets than lower bets, so you’d want to bet the highest amount possible when playing those machines. The trick is knowing how to read a payout schedule and figure out if it is worthwhile to bet max, or if you can save a little of your bankroll with smaller bets.

Now that you know the basics, follow these three simple tips and you should be able to have some good cheap entertainment at your local game. Look for the best payout schedules and remember that video poker offers some of the better odds of any game on the casino floor.

4. Play Online Wisely

Keeping in mind what we said about online paytables in the table above, choose your online casino wisely. The list of recommended casinos below places the sites with the most video poker games at the top of the list. At present, the games with the best odds are at the sites towards the bottom of the list.