The Basic Foundations of Strategy for Jacks or Better Video Poker

If you want to learn how to play a type of game, then you should start with the basics. There is no form of video poker more basic than Jacks or Better, and that makes it the perfect game to start with for players who want to learn about video poker in general. Learning Jacks or Better also has an added benefit of learning how to play a game that has a low house advantage with a payout rate of more than 99 percent, and you can quickly make small changes to the strategies you learn for this game to adapt to other types of video poker.

The basic aspect of strategy in Jacks or Better, like all forms of video poker, is that you are trying to choose the correct discards to give your hand the best average payoff available. To this end, you’ll need to learn which hands and draws are more valuable than others so that when you get into a situation where you can play your hand in multiple ways, you’ll know exactly what to do. We’re going to offer some basic advice here to give you a solid foundation to start with.

To start things off, you need to realize that there is only one draw that you will ever have that’s more important than straights or flushes, and that draw is four to a royal flush. For example, if you have AKQT5 all of hearts, then the correct play is to discard the five, break your flush, and go for the royal. You have high pairs which are pairs of jacks, queens, kings and aces. You also have low pairs that are of tens or worse. A high pair is stronger than a flush draw, but a flush draw is stronger than a low pair. This will help you to play situations where you have both a pair and a flush draw and can’t decide which one to go with.

In regular poker, outside straight draws are pretty strong hands a lot of the time, but in Jacks or Better video poker, they’re less likely to hit than a flush draw, and they pay out a lower prize when you do hit them. This is why if you have an outside straight draw and a low pair, you should keep the low pair. This covers all major situations that starting players need to know to get started.