When playing video poker it’s important to keep in mind that the hand you just hit has no affect on the next hand you draw. Video poker is not played with a 52 card deck with cards previously played being dropped from play, but rather from a constant random deal of a 52 card deck. Or to put in another way, if you just drew the ace of spades, you stand 1 chance in 52 of drawing the same card on the next deal. He’s not out of the game.
What this means for the video poker player is that we have to be careful not to make decisions on the hand in front of us based on what happened in the hand we just played. It’s human nature to think — I just drew a flush, so this next hand is less likely to be a flush. Therefore, I should play it as a low pair. But the machine you are playing doesn’t have a human nature. Your chances of drawing a flush this hand are equal to your chances of drawing a flush the last hand. Each hand stands alone and isolated in the realm of probability.
These means we can’t fall into the trap of trying to guess the outcome of our hands based on what the machine last gave us. No thinking “well, I just got two pair twice in a row, it can’t happen three times” because the machine doesn’t care. Play the strategy for each individual hand. Trust the strategy. Video poker isn’t a game of instinct, it’s a game of strategy.
Tags: strategy
