More than a few gamblers hear about how they can beat the house in video poker and immediately begin studying all of the strategy they can on the game. They learn where the best games are, what variations offer the highest payouts, and what move they should make in each instance.
Unfortunately, what many of these people don’t understand is that they’ll never come close to beating the house edge if they don’t play enough hands. And the reason why is because of a little concept called hand frequency. If you’re unaware of hand frequency in video poker, it is simply the amount of times that a certain hand will appear. For instance, you may have to play 40,000 hands (on average) before you are dealt a royal flush. On the other hand, a regular flush could appear 1 out of every 90 times depending on the video poker game you’re playing.
As you can see, you need to play a lot of video poker hands before you’ll see that royal flush. And the royal flush can account for anywhere between 2% to 10% of the total payouts you receive in video poker. So if we take the high end of the royal flush payouts at 10%, this means you are only earning 90% payouts on a 100% payout machine until you hit the royal flush.
What’s more is that many casual video poker players don’t even play enough to get straight flushes, which could account for another 10% of the total payout percentage. This being the case, you would only be earning 80% payouts assuming you are using perfect strategy. And this isn’t to discourage you from playing video poker since it is more profitable than slots in the long run. However, it’s important to understand how many hands you need to play before receiving the advertised payout percentage.
