How to Play Video Poker

1. Choose your stake: pick the coin value (the denomination) and the number of credits per hand, usually one to five. On games with coin columns, the column under your bet is the one that pays.
2. Press Deal: five cards appear face up.
3. Choose your holds: tap a card, or the Hold button under it, to keep it, and tap again to release it. You may keep all five, none, or any number in between.
4. Press Draw: the unheld cards are swapped for new ones, and there is no second draw.
5. Collect the payout: the final five cards are matched against the pay table and any win goes to the credit meter. A hand below the lowest paying line loses the stake.
6. Double-up, if offered: after a win, some games offer to gamble it. Declining keeps the win exactly as paid.

The game deals, replaces and scores the cards; you choose the stake, the holds and whether to gamble a win. Throwing away all five cards and standing on all five are both legitimate holds, and each is sometimes the correct one; the Jacks or Better page shows how often perfect play does each.

Each hand starts from a complete, shuffled virtual deck: 52 cards, or 53 in Joker Poker. Your replacement cards come from the cards that were not dealt to you: 47, or 48 in Joker Poker. A card you discard never comes back, and no fresh deck is brought in for the draw. Some games pick the replacement cards at the moment of the deal and reveal them in order. Others keep shuffling the remaining cards until you press Draw. The two designs give exactly the same odds.

The rules behind this are strict. Nevada requires a machine that presents a card game to give each card the same chance it would have in the live game, or to disclose any difference to the player. The testing standards that labs apply to casino machines and to online games say the cards must come from a randomly shuffled deck and that a removed card is not returned. The same standards forbid a game from adjusting its return according to what it has paid out before, and UK rules for online games ban such "compensated" games outright.

The key point: How often each hand is dealt is fixed by the deck. What the operator chooses is the pay table.

Multi-hand games follow one extra rule. The dealt hand appears on every line, your hold is copied to all of them, and each line draws its replacements from its own separate deck. The same card can turn up on several lines, and the lines can finish differently. A paying combination that you hold pays at least that much on every line, because every line keeps those cards.

The last column counts deals from a 52-card deck, before any draw. Suits never rank above one another. Wild-card games add paying hands of their own, such as five of a kind, a wild royal and, in Deuces Wild, four deuces, and some variants move the lowest paying hand up or down. Each variant's page lists its own lines in order.

After a winning hand, many games offer to stake the win on a double-or-nothing round, in one of two common forms. In the casino form, one card is dealt face up for the dealer and four face down. You pick one of the four, and a higher card than the dealer's doubles the win while a lower one loses it. A tie usually replays the round. The simpler form asks whether the next card will be red or black.

In short: Either way it is an even-money bet. It leaves the long-run return unchanged and makes results swing harder, turning a stream of small wins into fewer large ones or into nothing.

The testing standards used for these games require the feature to return exactly 100% in theory, to be optional and offered only after a win, to accept only winnings from the main game, and to show any cap on doubles or prizes. Operators can switch it off or cap it.

In our library, Habanero's games offer a "Double or Nothing" gamble that is switched off for a royal flush, Playtech's Jacks or Better shows its double-up limit on screen, and Arrow's Edge uses the pick-a-higher-card form, capped at 100 times the maximum bet.