How to Achieve 100 Percent Accuracy at Jacks or Better Video Poker

If you’re serious about getting good at video poker, then the first step in your journey should be to absolutely master Jacks or Better. This is the most basic form of the game, and learning to achieve a 100 percent accuracy rate at it will give you the foundation you need to score extremely well in any type of video poker without wild cards. It’ll also give you what you need to transition to wild card games, so you’ll be able to become the complete package when it comes to killing it in video poker.

The first thing you have to do to get to that point is learn the basic difficult situations. This is every situation where you could have a pair and a draw or two types of draws at the same time and need to know which option gives the better payout rate. For example, three to a royal beats four to a flush, and a high pair beats both of those, but a low pair beats neither. All a low pair beats is an open-ended straight draw. Learn those down pat, and you can move on to more advanced ideas.

Next you have to learn how to play high card hands with no obvious draws. This is difficult because there are more rules to follow, and some of those rules are anti-intuitive at times. For example, if you have AsKhJc8s4d, you should avoid keeping the AKJ combination or even the AK combination. The correct option is to just keep KJ. You have to remember that all high cards are of an equal value in terms of pairs, but KJ makes more straights than AK. There are other rules like this that can be really tricky to learn as well.

Finally after you have learned all of the rules, you have to learn the exceptions to those rules. The best example of an exception to the rule in Jacks or Better has to do with the rule than a low pair is always better than an open-ended straight draw. There is exactly one exception to this rule, and that’s when you have KQJTT with no flush draw. The rule would have you keep TT, but it’s actually slightly better to keep KQJT in this particular case because of the power of the high card draws to single pairs.