Casinos with Jacks or Better Video Poker
Jacks or Better Controversy. Jacks or Better started offering the casino cruises in April 2017. It didn’t take long for a controversy to develop around the ship. Just over a week after it started operating, the casino ship ran into a jetty when returning from its evening cruise. Jacks or Better Casino, Galveston: Hours, Address, Jacks or Better Casino Reviews: 3.5/5. The Jacks or Better Casino Boat offers casino cruises from Jacksonville. It leaves from historic Mayport on day cruises. Games available on casino cruises include 181 slot machines, blackjack, roulette, craps and more. There's a sports book too. Food and drinks are available onboard. Enjoy separate smoking and non-smoking decks. Jacks or Better Guide. Play Jacks or Better Online Poker, Silver Oak Casino‘s traditional and straightforward Jacks or Better style video poker game. Build a winning poker hand and double your winnings by playing the Double or Nothing Bonus Round. Jacks or Better.
An Introduction to Jacks or Better Video Poker
Poker is an interesting game in that it’s the most popular multi-player card game probably ever in the past couple of centuries, and a problem that’s always come up with it in gambling circles is the inability to play without other people who are available and ready to go.
Video poker was originally an answer to this issue, giving players a chance to play against the house instead of having to face off against other players who were playing the game on equal footing as well.
Jacks Or Better Casino Galveston
The end result was a game that was originally produced in the same styling as slots and with a similar history that eventually evolved into its own style and genre. If you want to get started with video poker in general, then you have to start with Jacks or Better if you want to really get anywhere.
A Brief History of Jacks or Better
In the very late 1800s and very early 1900s, there were mechanical slot-like games that used poker cards to award prizes based on their final hands. This led to the earliest draw poker machines, which were still mechanic at the time but that eventually led to video poker.
Where Jacks or Better comes into play is actually really interesting. A man named Si Redd, who had previously worked for Bally’s Gaming, was the first person to use this type of game in a video format. In the earliest versions that he created, you needed at least two pair to get a payout, and players didn’t respond to this approach in a very good way, which is probably because getting two pair seems difficult until you look at the numbers.
Most people aren’t familiar with the numbers, so when he switched over to allowing payouts for single pair hands as long as the pair was jacks or better (which is where the name comes from), the popularity of the games shot through the roof.
Si Redd’s video poker company SIRCOMA later rebranded and became a name that some people just might have heard of: International Game Technology, a company that’s still to this day one of the biggest suppliers of slots and video poker games in the entire world.
Rules and Gameplay
To understand the rules of this game, you’ll need to understand basic five-card poker hands. We’ll look at those and their respective payouts below, but first, we want to look at the basic gameplay procedure for this title:
- Players choose a bet size. This is usually expressed in coins (1-5) and a value selected for each coin.
- The player is dealt five cards from a standard 52-card deck.
- From those five cards, the player can choose to hold any number of them (or none of them).
- The cards that are not held are discarded, and new cards are given from the deck at random to replace them. Discards are not added back to the deck.
- Once the discards are replaced, the game evaluates the player’s cards to form the highest-ranking five-card poker hand possible, and that hand is compared to a pay table.
- If the hand is high enough on the pay table to warrant a win, that win is paid out, and that’s the end of the hand.
The concept is pretty simple, and it’s very obviously based on the standard style of five-card draw poker, which was one of the most popular forms of poker in the world at the time that the game was created despite having fallen by the wayside in more modern times.
Hand Rankings and Payouts
In what follows, we’ll give a basic understanding of the standard five-card poker hands that are used on the Jacks or Better pay table along with the standardized payouts.
Note that some games will have different payouts on their pay tables, and we’ll address those differences down below. The payouts we’ll use here are the standard pays that are considered the normal rules for the game, and it’s often called the “9/6” or “full pay” version of the game.
- Royal Flush – AKQJT of the same suit (800x)
- Straight Flush – Five consecutively ranked cards of the same suit (50x)
- Four of a Kind – Four cards of the same rank (25x)
- Full House – Three cards of a single rank with two cards of a different rank (9x)
- Flush – Five cards with the same suit (6x)
- Straight – Five cards consecutively ranked (4x)
- Three of a Kind – Three cards of the same rank (3x)
- Two Pair – Two cards of a single rank with two cards of a different rank (2x)
- Single Pair (Jacks or Better) – Two cards, Jacks or higher, of the same rank (1x)
All other hands yield no payout in this game. Note that you will always automatically be given the best payout possible based on the five cards in your final hand, so you don’t have to worry about mistakenly choosing the wrong payout or being paid less because you hold one type of hand when you also hold a higher-paying one.
Pay Table Variations
You’ll sometimes see pay tables that are lower than what you find in the above. If you play perfectly with the pay table above, you can get a payout rate of 99.54 percent, which is a house edge of just 0.46 percent on average.
![Jacks Or Better Casino Jacks Or Better Casino](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/lG48TEJNo1c/maxresdefault.jpg)
Most of the time, the only two payouts that will be variable are the pays for a full house and a flush. The reason the above pay table is called the 9/6 pay table is because these are the payouts for a full house and a flush respectively.
Likewise, a 9/5 pay table would mean that the full house hands pay 9x but that the flushes pay just 5x. Here is a quick overview of the best possible payout rates available for other common pay tables:
- 9/6 – 99.54 percent
- 9/5 – 98.45 percent
- 8/6 – 98.39 percent
- 8/5 – 97.30 percent
As you can see, there’s really no reason to play this game unless it uses the rule set with the 9/6 pay table since that gives you a better win rate overall compared to the other versions of the same game with different prizes.
Jacks or Better Video Poker Strategy and Tips
We have a number of guides on strategy for this game, and here are some of the most popular:
With that said, the basic idea of strategy in this game centers around making the best option possible for which cards you choose to discard. There are 32 different options for combinations of discards (including keeping all five hands, which is always an option), and you have to try to figure out which of those 32 ways is the best choice.
Progressive Jackpots
Some versions of Jacks or Better video poker will have a progressive available. These games usually have a lower regular pay table in exchange for a royal flush or some other hand that triggers the progressive. The rules for these games can vary a bit, but if the jackpot is large enough, you can have an edge against the house when you play them.
Overview
There’s no denying the importance of Jacks or Better in the video poker genre and in the overall casino industry. It’s still one of the most popular non-slot games out of everything else that’s available, and players from all over the world enjoy playing this game online and in land-based establishments.
FAQ
Which online casinos have Jacks or Better Video Poker?
Use the list of Jacks or Better Video Poker casinos to see all online casinos that have Jacks or Better Video Poker.
Galveston Casino
Jacks or Better video poker offers some of the best odds in the casino. The best version of Jacks or Better video poker, the 9/6 variant, has a payback percentage of 99.5%, which is better for the player than just about any other game in the casino. Even 8/5 Jacks or Better has a payout percentage of 97.3%, which is far worse than a full pay but still far better than most bets on most other casino games.
But in order to enjoy the high payback percentage, you have to play using expert Jacks or Better strategy. The casinos and the manufacturers estimate that players who don’t use an expert strategy are giving up between 2% and 4%, which is a significant amount of money.
How significant?
Consider the average hourly loss of an expert player who’s running true to the mathematical expectation of a game. She’s making 600 wagers per hour at $1.25 per wager, so she’s putting $750 per hour into action. With a house edge of 0.5%, she can expect to lose $3.75 per hour. Assuming she gamblers for ten hours on her trip, she’s got lots of entertainment for just $37.50.
Then let’s take a look at her husband, who ignores expert Jacks or Better video poker strategy and just follows his hunches. (We’ll also assume that his hunches aren’t very good.) He’s losing 4.5% of his bets, which means that he’s losing nine times as much as his wife. At the end of the trip, he’s lost $337.50.
That’s a significant difference.
How to develop an expert Jacks or Better strategy
Computer programs can determine the expected value of any given hand. There are 32 different ways to play any given hand, but only one way has the best expectation for the player. The more often the player chooses to play her hand in that way, the lower the house edge becomes.
But since there are 2.5 million different possible starting hands in video poker, expert strategy groups hands according to types, in order to make the process easier to learn. After all, memorizing 2.5 million different potential decisions is probably impossible unless you’re a machine, but memorizing several types of hands isn’t as hard.
When you consider that 55% of your hands will lose no matter what, you can see that strategy decisions can be narrowed down pretty fast. In fact, a pair of jacks or better will make up 21% of the number of winning hands you get. The small hands, including three of a kind, two pair, and a pair of jacks, make up 70% of the total return on the game.
How to use a Jacks or Better strategy
Play 3 card poker for fun. All Jacks or Better strategy tables consist of a list of hands. The player starts at the top, which is the best possible hand, and then moves down until she finds the hand that she actually has. She then plays it according to the strategy instructions.
Different Jacks or Better strategy charts offer somewhat different instructions. Below I’ve provided one Jacks or Better video poker strategy that’s easy to learn. The house edge against someone using this strategy is only 0.8%, which isn’t as kind to the player as 0.5%, but it’s still considerably better than just about every other game in the casino. And of course, this assumes that you’re playing a full pay, 9/6 Jacks or Better game.
The Jacks or Better Strategy Chart
Keep any 2 pair or better paying combination, UNLESS you also have a 4 card royal flush. If you have a 4 card royal flush, then you’ll always draw to the royal flush. |
Keep any 4 card straight flush. |
Keep any pair of jacks or better. |
Keep any 3 cards to a royal flush. |
Keep any 4 cards to a flush. |
Keep any pair lower than jacks or better. |
Keep any 4 card open straight draw. |
Keep any unsuited AKQJ. |
Keep any 2 suited high cards. |
Keep any 3 cards to a straight flush. |
Keep any unsuited KQJ. |
Keep any 2 unsuited high cards. |
Keep any K, Q, or J if you have a 10 of the same suit. |
Keep any single high card. |
Discard all 5 cards and draw a new hand. |
One of the main principles behind most video poker strategies is that you want the machine to deal you a winning hand. If you’re dealt a winning hand, you will very rarely discard any of those cards to draw to something else. The only exception is 4 cards to a royal flush, and that exception is only there because the payout on that hand is so large compared to the other hands.
In fact, you’ll notice that a lot of the Jacks or Better strategy focuses on the royal flush. You’ll only see a royal flush once in every 40,000 or so hands, but the payout makes for a big part of your overall expectation. Golden princess review. If you have four cards to a royal flush, you’ll always draw to it. If you have three cards to a royal flush, you’ll always draw to it UNLESS you have a winning combination, in which case you’ll keep the winning cards instead.
Jacks Or Better Casino Boat Owner
A four-card flush draw is better than a low pair, but both of them are better than a straight draw. The reason, again, has to do with the differences in the payouts as compared to the possibility of finishing your hand.
This Jacks or Better strategy requires memorizing 15 lines of rules/guidelines, but it’s far easier than a more advanced strategy. Once you’ve mastered this, you can easily move up to a more advanced strategy with about 21 lines or rules/guidelines, and then you can gain back that additional 0.3%. Play for free or real money today! Put this Jacks or Better video poker strategy into practice and watch your winnings grow!
Interested in trying your hand at other online video poker games? Check out this article on 7 tips to improve your video poker strategy to ensure you play at the top of your game.