Approaching Deuces Wild With an Eye Towards Mastery

Of all the types of video poker, Deuces Wild is one of the hardest to learn to play perfectly. The online setting is great for learning it, but what’s really cool is that if you find the right paytable in the live setting, you can actually get an advantage against the machine if you know how to play right. Having an eye towards mastery in this game requires a whole lot of work, however, because it’s one of the most difficult games available in an online casino second only two Deuces and Joker wild.

There are a few stages of learning this game that you’ll have to go through if you want to reach expert status. The first is learning the basic formats of how to tell how to play your discards in different situations. Focusing on three groups of hands is good for beginning players: hands with no wilds, hands with one wild, and hands with two or more wilds. Hands with one or fewer wilds will represent the vast majority of hands, so it makes sense to break the types of hands up in this way. Overall, this is your starting point, and you have to master each group of hands individually with about as much work as it would take to put into three different non-wild games.

With the first group of hands that don’t include a wild, you’re going to learn the basic principles of Deuces Wild. This includes valuing all single pair hands the same and understanding that the fact that there are no single pair payouts drastically simplifies this aspect of the game. With the second group of hands that include a single wild, you’re going to run into the most difficult scenarios in the game, and this is the group of hands that you’re going to work on the most if you want to achieve mastery.

After you get the general ideas understood, like how to differentiate between the different types of straight flush draws with a single wild, you’ll start to look at the exceptions to the rules like when you should keep certain draws over pairs, and vice-versa. You’ll also learn things like when to break up made hands to go for more powerful draws and which types of draws aren’t worth ever going after when you have multiple wild cards in your hand.