Learn How to Do Video Poker Analysis By Hand

June 20, 2014 by

Video Poker AnalysisWhen you’re doing video poker analysis, you often have to rely on pre-made tools or programs that do all of the calculations for you. However, if you’re going to just analyze situations where you’re drawing a single card, then you can fairly easily do it by hand if you know the process to follow. We’re going to show you how to do that process here so that you can study to get better at online video poker games on your own and understand what’s being done to find the value of hands.

Organizing Your Video Poker Analysis

To do this, you need to make a list of each of the possible paying hands you could make with your draw and how many cards will complete that hand. For example, if you’re drawing to after discarding the in 9/6 Jacks or Better, you’ll have six cards that can give you a high pair and nine cards that can give you a flush. Write the payout for each hand beside of this.

For each possible type of made hand, you want to find the value that that type of hand gives to your draw. To do this, multiply the number of cards that complete your draw by the payout value, and divide that number by 47. For the high pairs in the example above, you’d do 6 * 1 / 47 to get about 0.128. For the flush draw cards, you’d do 9 * 6 / 47 to give you 1.149. Add all of these results together to get your final value for your draw: 0.128 + 1.149 = 1.277. This final value is the average payout you’ll get with your draw.

The Importance of This Analysis

In all types of video poker, the goal is to figure out which set of discards is going to give you the best average payout. The analysis we have detailed above will help you to do just that by giving you the mathematical basis for what those average payouts will be in situations where you’re discarding a single card.

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