This page is an attempt to dislodge some of the myths implanted in your brain over the years, or perhaps stop any from being placed there. Many, many people have informed me as to the status of the video poker machine I'm walking up to, telling me things like 'that machine just hit a royal, so don't use it because another royal isn't due', or 'that machine is stone cold, nobody's been winning it'. Video poker machines are similar to slot machines in this respect, they do not care about what has happened recently, every spin and every hand is a fresh one that is not affected by any previous play on the machine. Each time a new hand is dealt to you, the game will react only to your skill and its pay table, nothing else.

What determines a 'good' machine does not, as many mistakenly believe, revolve around how often they produce royals. The rest of the pay table can have a much more noticeable effect on how much you make. Take for instance the example of a full pay Jacks or Better game. Playing this with perfect strategy makes for a royal once in 40,400 hands. During those 40,000 odd hands you're likely to hit 465 full houses and 445 flushes. If the pay table shortchanges you on either of those two winning hands, the amount withheld from you can significantly change the worth of the machine.

It is often noted, by those who love to give free video poker advice, that you have to play higher-denomination machines in video poker because the low denomination ones are tight. The denomination of the machine has nothing to do with tightness and looseness, the only thing that does is the pay table. The pay table reveals whether or not playing the maximum number of coins is necessary or not. To play a machine thru to its full potential payoff usually involves hitting a royal flush at some point. If a royal flush is paid a disproportionate amount for full coin play compared to less than full coin play, you know you need to play full coins to reach a decent payout percentage. Some machines will let you play with less than full coins, and when you hit a royal they can pay you absolutely nothing at all. You can imagine the frustration of hitting a royal flush and not being paid a cent, especially if you'd been waiting for that royal to come up for any lengthy amount of time.

Our most important piece of advice for any aspiring video poker players is this, practice your strategy on either low denomination machines at first, or for free on the Internet. Once you have become pretty fluid in your strategy, then seek out and play a full play machine. More advice for novices: It's also best to being your video poker career with one style of machine. If you attempt to learn two or three machines at once, you will definitely find yourself confused between strategies at some point in your play.