The online casino offers multiple poker options. There are 3-hand, 5-hand and 7-hand games, games for single-players and multi-player games, games with give-aways, one-deck and multi-deck poker types, games with progressive jackpots, games with wild cards and many other variations.
If you’re simply interested in playing a game that delivers a fun-filled gaming event of anticipation, interactive gameplay and opportunities to win, you can choose the game that provides the type of action and excitement that suits your personal gaming preferences.
If, however, you want to turn your poker adventure into a lucrative gaming experience, you should consider your poker game choice carefully in order to achieve the highest opportunities to achieve the best winning payouts.
How Player Skills Affect Return to Player Rates and Casino Payouts
Poker is one of the few games at the casino that requires both skill and luck to win. That’s why poker has one of the highest Return to Player rates at the casino. The RTP is the percentage of total wagered money a game pays back to players over time. It’s calculated based on an analysis of hundreds of thousands of rounds of the game. For instance, an RTP of 98% would mean that, on estimate, 98% of the hands of a specific game played would win.
The higher a game’s random results, the lower the RTP becomes. But a game in which skill plays a more prominent role, like poker, has a higher RTP because the player’s skill affects the results of the game. When a player understands what the odds say about when is the best time to stand, to trade in cards and to fold that player is better able to assess the best way to make the mathematically correct decisions that are needed in order to maximize the game in the long run.
Poker Skills
In poker, anyone with a bit of luck can win some hands but players who have more skill enjoy more long-term success. A skilled player knows how to pick good spots to get money in and places where he knows that he's got more equity in the hand.
A skilled poker player is able to be cognitively agile, have an understanding of math that allows for the correct manipulations and conditional probability and have the mental strength to play a strong mental game.
Skilled poker players are also aware of the importance of choosing a poker variation that will give them the best opportunity to build the best poker hand. They want to find a poker variation in which the level of randomness is as low as possible because they want to control as much of the gameplay as they can.
In-person poker players rely a lot on their skills of bluffing and reading bluffs but when playing video poker the emphasis is on assessing the probabilities of each hand as accurately as possible so as to make the proper moves for each individual situation.
Poker Variations with the Highest RTP
If you’re playing video poker to win, you want to start out by playing the games with the highest RTP percentages. These games include:
Deuces Wild
Deuces Wild has an RTP percentage of 98.91%, one of the highest poker RTP rates. Deuces Wild is basically a 5-card draw game but in this variation, the deuces are wild. At the beginning of the game, you will place your bet and then be dealt 5 cards.
You then choose which cards to hold and which to discard. The discarded cards are replaced with new cards which gives you your final hand. All the twos are considered as wilds which means that they can replace any other card to complete a hand.
For example, if you have three nines, a two and a five, your two will become your fourth nine and you can complete a combination to create a hand of four-of-a-kind.
Bonus Poker
Bonus Poker is another simple video poker game that offers a high potential for delivering winning payouts. Bonus Poker has an RTP of 98.98%. In Bonus Poker, like in Jacks or Better, the lowest paying hand is a pair of Jacks.
The game starts with the player’s ante bet and an optional separate bonus bet. The player receives 2 hidden cards, which s/he checks. If s/he wants to continue s/he doubles the ante – if s/he doesn’t move forward, s/he forfeits the ante.
5 open cards are then dealt and the player makes the best five-card hand from those 7 cards. This variation is favored by many knowledgeable poker players because of the bonus payouts which are paid out when a hand of four-of-a-kind or higher is hit.
Jacks or Better
Jacks or Better features an RTP of 98.25% which means that it’s a good choice for gamers who are looking to score wins. In this game, each player plays with a 5-card-down hand after the ante. A second betting round takes place only after one player opens with a pair of Jacks, after which, the hand is played as a 5-card draw and the best hand wins.
Joker Poker
Joker Poker is played with a standard deck of 52 cards plus one Joker card. The RTP of this game is 98.47% which means that players can look forward to a higher-than-average win rate if they play smart. In this variation of 5-card draw poker, the gameplay is conventional EXCEPT that the Joker acts as a wild and can be used to improve or complete any hand.
