Theoretical Payback in Video Poker

In this article, we’ll discuss the issue that will help you analyze the situation and see whether you can turn the odds in your favor. We will consider maximum payback rate and the money the casino returns to the players according to loyalty program.

Thus, we can calculate general theoretical payback. Your goal is to find a video poker with minimum house edge with the most beneficial conditions of comp points.

Let’s take 9/6 Jacks or Better video poker as an example. The optimal strategy can bring you up to 99.54% payback rate. In other words, in the long term you lose less than 0.5% of the total amount of your bets. This is a good number but still not in your favor.

However, if you choose the casino with a generous loyalty program, you’ll improve this number and even gain the edge over the house.

Suppose that the casino gives the player 1 comp point for every $20 of bets and allows to exchange the points for real money as 10:1. Therefore, for every $100 of bets you’ll get 5 comp points that are exchanged for 50 cent.

This means that the total theoretical payback is increased by 0.5%. After adding 0.5% to 99.54% we get 100.04% - a pretty good outcome.

Note that solid casinos have a multi-level loyalty program. The higher you manage you climb up the client hierarchy, the more beneficial conditions of receiving and exchanging comp points you’ll get.

Many casinos organize special offers, lotteries, tournaments, and other events that have comp points as prizes. Or days on which comp points are credited double or even triple. To achieve positive results, make use of these offers.

When choosing the best video poker, you should not only find the model with maximum theoretical payback rate, but also calculate how much you can increase it through the loyalty program. Besides video poker, this method can be applied in other casino games –although few of them offer a high theoretical return.