There’s a saying: the casino is the house, and the house always wins. While we disagree with the sentiment to a point, there’s no getting around the fact that you do have a house edge that tends to make the casino keep more of your money than what you’re winning. Surely you can turn the tables on the casino though? Not always. There are a few games where you really can indeed compete with the casino and take home more money than what you’re spending. Video poker is just one of those games where you can crack the odds and bring home more profits — if you keno how to pull it off, of course.

Now, don’t let us steer you into a bad direction. We’re not advocating any type of casino hacking or anything crazy like that. That’s for other guides that don’t seem to remember that if you were to engage in illegal behavior, not only would you not win, but you would end up losing your account and all of the money in it.  Therefore it’s definitely worth your while to make sure that you play fair and play the right way. You don’t have to resort to those sneaky tricks anyway.

The key to understanding how to push forward is to try to move towards the concept of expected value. As we mentioned before, the casinos make money on the house edge that’s built into all of their games. The house edge can be from 0.3% to 8% in video poker — just depends on the specific game and pay table. Simply put, every time you put a dollar into the video poker machine, you should expect to receive back 0.92 and 0.997$ back. So basically we need to have an expected value above 100% and play long enough to get that point.  It’s a little harder than it seems, but it can be done.

You will need to start by being incredibly selectively about the video poker that you play. It’s tempting to just assume that you’ll never have any problems whatsoever with the video poker world, so all of the games are the same. However, that’s really not the truth at all. The reality is that you’re going to want to make sure that you need to pick the best rate of return.

The best video poker games right now are Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus. These both have a max payout percentage of 100.1725% and 100.067%, respectively. We’re assuming that you’re doing a full pay version of the game, and your strategy is flawless.

When it comes to the strategy side, you’re going to need to make sure that are making all of the right choices. We’ll use the Double Double Bonus game as the example. You’ll need to bet five coins for each hand in order to get the maximum bonus and thus raise your payout percentage as high as possible. You want to look at your starting hand and hold the cards that are going to grow into something bigger and better than what you started with. For example, if you have Qs – Js – Ts – 3s – Jh. If you’re trying to play for maximum strategy, you would look up a Double Double Bonus full strategy chart, match up the cards that you have, and study them again. In this case, you would have a high pair of Jacks, a Q-J-T suited with one penalty card (the other Jack), and four to a flush. The right move is to ditch the four flush and pair and keep the Q- J – T suited. It has a much higher value than anything else.

You might wonder what penalty cards are. It’s easy – they are any cards that you plan to throw out that hurt your chances of completing the draw. Let’s take another example: 7c-9c-Jc-8s-5h. If you try to keep the 7c-9c-Jc, the 8 is the penalty card because it’s one less card that can make you a straight. However, you have a higher expected return/value going for the straight flush than to try to hit the inside straight.

There are many different types of penalty cards, even. There are straight penalty cards that interfere with your ability to make a straight, and flush penalty cards that interfere with your ability to make a flush. High pair penalty cards keep you from making a high pair, which would be Jacks or better.

It can seem like a lot to learn in a short time, but it’s definitely worth it when you think about everything that you can achieve by pushing for higher profits. Why not get started today?