Heavily Nuanced Jacks or Better Video Poker Scenarios

Most players who know the basic strategies for Jacks or Better still make mistakes in particular situations that don’t come up very often. Learning how to play these situations is how you can take the next step on optimizing your payout rate, and it will also help you to identify situations in other video poker games that are the exception to the rules. What we want to do for you here is give you three of the situations that skilled players mess up the most often and show you the correct way to play.

Let’s start with KQJTT with no flush draw. You have to decide here whether to play your pair of tens or whether to go with the open-ended straight draw. Generally speaking, the rule that applies here is that you should take the low pair over the straight draw. However, this is the lone exception to that rule. Because of the power of being able to make three different high pairs in addition to having eight outs to a straight, you should ditch one of the tens and go for the straight draw with this particular hand.

Here’s another fun one. Suppose you have AcQcJc8c8s. Right away, the skilled player will almost always recognize that this is a scenario where you have to choose between a flush draw and a low pair, and they will make the correct decision between those two options which is to go to the four-card flush draw. However, that’s wrong. Three cards to a royal flush are actually stronger than four cards to a plain flush. The power of the long-shot royal flush draw in addition to the ability to make runner straights and runner flushes along with the three high cards to make pairs just overwhelms the plain flush draw.

Playing weak hands is difficult, so here’s a difficult example to work on. You hold AsQhTh7d4s for ace-high. Most players will automatically go with the AQ pairing here, but that’s actually incorrect. The royal flush pairings of QT and JT are slightly stronger than the non-royal pairings of AK, AQ, AJ, and KJ. Along similar lines, they’re weaker than non-royal pairings of KQ and QJ because of the straight potential. Knowing the order of strength for these pairings will have you playing perfectly with those bad hands that you get so often in this game.