Joker Poker 101: Your Ultimate Beginner’s Playbook

Joker Poker is one of the video poker games that’s also sometimes called “Joker Wild.” Almost all VP games are just copies of Jacks or Better, and Joker Poker is no exception. The only variation between it and Jacks or Better is the introduction of a wild card — the joker.

Joker Poker is played from a virtual 53-card deck rather than a 52-card deck. The pay table is altered to make up for the increased possibility of having a high-ranking hand.

This article contains all you need to know to play Joker Poker.

The Essentials of Joker Poker

Ninety-nine percent of video poker games, including Joker Poker, are the same. You put money in, and it is translated into credits depending on the machine’s denomination.

For Instance:

If you’re playing on a quarter ($0.25) machine and put in $100, you have 400 credits.

That same $100 would be 100 credits on a dollar machine.

You then specify how many credits you wish to wager on a hand. You can wager from 1 to 5 credits, but you should ALWAYS wager 5 credits. The reason for this is easy but not easily important.

The highest jackpot in any video poker game is a royal flush — the 10, jack, queen, king, and ace of one suit.

That hand returns 200 for 1, except for one exception.

If you have played for 5 credits, you receive an 800 for 1 payment for a royal flush. That’s a sufficient difference in your payment to greatly impact your payback percentage for the game.

We need to discuss payback percentage before we go any farther, too.

If you’re discussing a casino game, it carries both a house edge and a payback percentage. Individuals find that they’re referring to the house edge when referring to a table game; to a payback percentage when they’re referring to a gambling machine.

They are two sides of the same coin. In fact, if you add up the payback percentage and the house edge, the total is always 100%.

House edge is the mathematical edge the casino enjoys over the player, a share of each bet that will be taken by the casino in the long term. Payback percentage is the money that the casino statistically will pay back for every bet.

When we report that a casino game has an edge of 1%, we mean that the odds and payouts place the casino in a position where they can expect to win $1 for every $100 you wager. But that’s an expected amount over an enormous number of trials. In the short term, anything may occur.

If we indicate that a casino game has a payback percentage of 99%, then we mean that for each time you place a bet of $100, the casino is expected to return $99 to you in winnings. This, also, is a statistical average.

Your objective playing any game on which the casino has an edge is to keep that edge as small as possible, or as it is sometimes put, to keep the payback percentage as high as possible.

Therefore, it is reasonable to bet always the amount that gives you the highest payback percentage, all other things being equal.

The probability of getting a royal flush is always small. You’ll only see that hand once every 40,000 hands or so, even with the wild card. That’s because a wild royal flush doesn’t pay out the same as a real royal flush.

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Anyway, always bet 5 coins.

After you select your bet, the Joker Poker machine “hands” you five cards. You get to retain or reject any of the five cards in your hand, offering you 32 possible combinations in which to play each hand from retaining all five cards to rejecting all five and anything in between.

Every way of playing a hand gives an expected return. This is the chance of each hand that you could end up with multiplied by the reward for that hand. This renders Joker Poker a skill game and a game of luck. The more errors that you make in your strategy, the less the payback percentage for the game will be.

Once you’ve decided what cards to hold and what to discard, the machine will give you replacement cards and reward you according to the pay table of the game. That pay table has been derived from the usual poker hand ranking.

The pay tables for Joker Poker differ from one machine to the next, so We need to take a few minutes describing Joker Poker pay tables.

Poker Pay Tables Explained

We assume you’re going to bet the 5-coin maximum on any game, and We’ll show the payouts for each hand on an X for Y basis. We should mention something about that, too.

When you’re playing table games, the odds that a bet wins are given as X to Y.

For Example:

A bet on a roulette wheel for a single number wins at 35 to 1.

That is, if you wager $1, you receive your dollar back, AND a bonus of $35.

Video poker games, however, don’t return the original bet. They calculate you the money before spinning the wheels or shuffling the cards. Any amount you win is paid in lieu OF the bet you just placed.

An even-money return at the blackjack table is a profit.

An even-money return at a video poker machine is breaking even.

Here’s the optimal possible Joker Poker pay table, also referred to as a “full pay” Joker Poker game:

•A natural royal flush pays 800 for 1

•A five of a kind pays 200 for 1

•A wild royal flush pays 100 for 1

• A straight flush pays at 50 for 1

• A four of a kind pays at 20 for 1

• A full house pays at 7 for 1

• A flush pays at 5 for 1

• A straight pays at 3 for 1

• A three of a kind pays at 2 for 1

• Two pair pays at 1 for 1

• A pair of kings or better pays at 1 for 1

The payback percentage of this game, if you play with best strategy, is 100.64%. This indicates that you have a 0.64% advantage over the house, which is a rare occurrence.

How do you calculate that payback percentage?

You apply a computer program to calculate the chance of winning each payout. That chance times the amount of the payout is the expected return for the bet. Because there are several possible results, you sum up the expected return for each result to arrive at the total expected return for the game.

The chance of ending up with nothing is approximately 55%. Times that by winnings of $0, and that contributes 0% to the payback percentage.

A king or ace pair, however, pays out at 1 for 1, and the chance of ending up with that hand is 14.2%. This contributes 14.2% to the total payback percentage of the game.

Two pair occurs a bit less frequently — 11.1% of the time. That adds up to 11.1%, leaving you with 25.3% of your total payback percentage.

Three of a kind actually occurs more frequently — 13.4% of the time. (That’s due to the wild card.) Because that pays off at 2 for 1, that adds 26.8% to the payback percentage.

Those three hands claim more than half of the game’s statistical winnings. They just show up that much more often than the other hands.

If you keep those figures going and sum them all up, you end up with 100.64%.

But you’ll come across many variations of these pay tables. A more common Joker Poker pay table pays out the same as above, only with smaller payouts for five of a kind (150 instead of 200) and a wild royal flush (80 instead of 100). That changes the payback percentage to 99.98%.

You can play Joker Poker games with a theoretical payback percentage of as low as 94%, which is still higher than the majority of slot machine games. Nevertheless, my advice is to play video poker games where you can achieve a payback percentage of 98% or higher.

Most Joker Poker video poker machines provide a payback percentage at least that good, too. Only the most miserly of casinos provide a worse pay table than that.

The Best Approach for Joker Poker

Video poker strategies are like blackjack basic strategy. They instruct you on how to play any hand you receive. Their format is different, though.

In blackjack basic strategy, you have your total on the left and the dealer’s up card at the top. You cross-index the two to get the best way to play your hand.

But in video poker, you don’t cross-index anything. You simply have your hand, and you want to end up with the best achievable expected return.

So a video poker strategy card is simply a ranking of cards you may have in your hand, from strongest to weakest. You begin at the top and read down until you find a hand that is like yours. The best hand on that list that is like your hand is the cards you’ll want to hold.

You should never stray from fundamental video poker strategy, incidentally, regardless of how good your intuition is. Math doesn’t lie. The players who lose least and win most heed the math of probability, not their gut.

Joker Poker strategy cards aren’t infallible, however, due to the enormous number of possible card combinations you could possibly hold. Nevertheless, even an abridged strategy card should bring you to within 0.1% of the optimal return for playing the game with perfect strategy.

In games with one or more wild cards, you’ll usually have two strategy cards to look at. One fundamental thing to remember about wild card video poker games is this.

You NEVER discard a wild card.

For a hand without a joker, a reasonable strategy might look like the below scenario.

Always have a pat royal flush, straight flush, or four of a kind. You would never break up any of these hands in an attempt to improve them. The rewards are too great, for one reason. And most of them can’t be improved, for another.

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Other than those hands, you will ALWAYS draw to four cards to a royal flush. The payment is so large for this hand that you would even break up a pat hand in an attempt to receive the royal flush. The only sort of pat hand you could conceivably have, however, would be two kings or aces or a straight or flush. The disparity in the payment is so large that it’s worth sacrificing the guaranteed payment, however.

Then the best you can have is a pat full house or a pat flush.

Next best is an open straight flush draw. An open draw is one when the cards on both sides of the straight can complete your straight flush, unlike in the case of an inside straight draw where you require a single card and a single card alone.

In the example below:

•A 5-6-7-8 of one suit is open-ended because a 4 or a 9 can complete your straight.

•A 5-6-8-9 of one suit is an inside draw because only a 7 can complete the straight.

Then, prefer three of a kind.

Then, inside straight flush draw.

Then, a pat straight. Notice that you’ll throw away a card to try to achieve your straight flush even if it means breaking up your straight.

Then, two pair.

Then, it begins to get more specific and complex. Mostly, however, you’ll attempt to hold three to a royal flush rather than a pair. You’re considering the following components for choosing which cards to hold:

•Suitedness

•Connectedness

•Rank

The wild card strategy table is similar, though you’d like to remember that you’re never going to discard a wild card.

Conclusion

Learning to play Joker Poker is as easy as can be if you’ve played Jacks or Better or any other video poker game before. If you’re new to VP games, you should still be able to get where you need to go in no time with the tutorial in this post.

WE enjoy Joker Poker because it’s a good middle ground between Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, which features four wild cards. The addition of the wild cards does alter the game, but since Joker Poker features only one, it’s not quite as radical a change in strategy.