One of my favorite video poker games is Deuces Wild. The strategy and tips on this page should help you get the best possible payback percentage from this game.
DEUCES WILD STRATEGY Deuces Wild strategy decisions are determined not only by the hand you’re dealt but also by how many deuces you’re holding. The chart below will show the ranking of hands to hold in descending order. If a particular hand isn’t on the list discard everything and draw five cards. Deuces Wild Video Poker Strategy To Win More Hands. Deuces Wild Video Poker Strategy: The most important thing to remember when playing Deuces Wild is that the four 2s (deuces) in the deck can be substituted for any other card of any rank, in any suit. It’s what makes playing deuces wild video poker so exciting. Video Poker Strategy Trainer - Deuces Wild This is the popular Deuces Wild video poker game with a strategy analysis engine built-in to help you train to become a better player. After each hand is dealt, the strategy engine calculates all possible outcomes to determine the best cards to hold to get the highest payoff. You can click 'Hint' to view the results or you can play without hints.
If you’re not familiar with Deuces Wild, it’s just like Jacks or Better video poker, but with one major difference. All of the twos in the deck are wild cards. That means they can substitute for any card you need to make a better hand.
Your Basic Strategy of Deuces Wild Poker Here, I will explain the optimal strategy of Deuces Wild Video Poker. You won’t find anything complicated - and that’s not a bad thing for a first-timer. Part 4 of my video poker lessons. Full Pay Deuces Wild (FPDW) is one of the best video poker games you can find in the casino. The payback percentage for thi.
Keep in mind that, in video poker, you don’t have to declare what hand you wind up with. The machine automatically credits you with the best possible poker hand according to the pay table it’s using.
Here are some Deuces Wild video poker strategy tips you can use moving forward.
1 – Understand What You’re Getting Into
One of the aspects of Deuces Wild that I don’t like is the variation in pay tables. In Jacks or Better, you can mostly just look at the payouts for the full house and the flush and have a good idea of what kind of payback percentage you’re facing.
But with Deuces Wild, they change quite a few more payouts for a few more hands. Your goal should be to find the best possible pay table.
To keep things simple, the pay table for a Deuces Wild video poker game is usually abbreviated to look like this:
1-2-3-4-4-10-16-25-200-800
Those are the payouts for the following hands in the following order:
- Three of a kind
- Straight
- Flush
- Full house
- Four of a kind
- Straight flush
- Five of a kind
- Wild royal flush
- Four deuces
- Natural royal flush
For example, a three of a kind on this game pays off at 1 for 1. A straight pays off at 2 for 1. A flush pays off at 3 for 1, and so on.
If you’re familiar with video poker and slot games in the US already, you already know that the payout for a gambling machine is handled on an X for Y basis, not an X to Y basis.
That’s one of the big differences between video poker games and table games. An even money payout on a gambling machine is like a push on a table game. An even money payout on a table game results in a one-unit profit.
2 – Learn the Best Deuces Wild Pay Tables
The pay table I listed in the first section is for a variation of Deuces Wild called “Not So Ugly Deuces Wild.” It’s not a full pay game, which means it doesn’t have the best possible payout. Good luck finding full pay Deuces Wild anymore!
But the payback percentage for NSUD is still better than almost any other game in the casino. The payback percentage for NSUD is 99.8%, but that assumes optimal play on the part of the player.
Deuces Wild Video Poker Optimal Strategy
If you make bad decisions, the payback percentage for that game is dramatically lower. The pay table for a full pay game, which is a game where the player actually has an edge over the casino, looks like this:
1-2-2-3-5-9-15-25-200-800
That 5 for 1 payoff for the four of a kind makes all the difference. You’d think that it wouldn’t have that big an effect, but when you’re dealing with a game where there are four wild cards, the four of a kind comes up a lot more frequently than in other video poker games.
The payback percentage for a game with that pay table is 100.76%, which means you have a significant edge over the house. Another of the best pay tables for Deuces Wild is this one:
1-2-2-3-4-8-15-25-500-800
Notice that 500 for 1 payout for the four deuces. That’s a big deal. The payback percentage for this version is 100.15%, which is also a significant edge for the player. That game is also often called “Loose Deuces Wild.”
3 – Understand Why Your Decisions Are Important
Some people don’t believe that their playing decisions in video poker matter much. After all, you have no meaningful decisions to make on a slot machine. Since a video poker machine looks almost exactly like a slot machine, why would your decisions matter?
But think about this… Suppose you’re nuts, and every time you’re dealt a natural royal flush, you decide to discard everything except the ace.
Can you see how that would affect your payback percentage for the game?
Even if you’re the type of person who would make the mistake of holding onto a pair when you had four to a royal flush, it’s easy to see how that would affect your payback percentage.
After all, by holding the pair, you’re hoping to get a threeof a kind or better. That’s only an even money payout. By holding the four to a royal flush, you have a lower probability of getting a winning hand, but when you do, you get a whopping 800 for 1 payout.
It’s easy to see how that difference in decisions can result in a lower payback percentage for the player, too, right?
4 – Making the Right Choices in Deuces Wild Video Poker
Most video poker writers present video poker strategy in a table format, with a list of hands in descending value. That’s a legitimate way of presenting such a strategy.
These strategies, by the way, always sacrifice a certain amount of optimal play for usability. A strategy table for Deuces Wild that was 100% correct would be too long and unwieldy to use, at least if you wanted to get in more than a few hands per hour.
They still manage to get within 0.1% or 0.2% of what’s optimal.
I don’t like presenting such tables, though. Most of my readers are recreational players who aren’t fighting for every tenth of a percent.
For them, I’m going to offer a couple of tips about making the right strategy decisions in Deuces Wild. The first and most important of these should be easy to remember.
NEVER discard any deuces.
It doesn’t matter what other cards are in the hand or which other cards you’re going to discard or keep.
You ALWAYS hold any deuces that you get.
It’s so important that I’m going to repeat it again.
ALWAYS keep your deuces.
5 – Bet the Maximum of Five Coins
This is actually just as important as never discarding deuces. Most video poker games allow you to bet between one and five coins per hand. You should always bet the maximum of five coins.
The pay tables that I listed above show the payouts on a “for one” basis. That’s not how they’re presented on the machines themselves, though.
They just multiply those numbers by the number of coins you’re playing, so that you can see the actual size of the win for each hand.
That’s okay, as long as you remember that the only hand where the payout changes based on the number of coins you play is the natural royal flush.
If you play four coins or fewer per hand, the payout for that hand is only 200 for 1. But if you play five coins per hand, the payout for a royal flush is 800 for 1.
Sure, a royal flush only comes around once every 40,000 hands, but those extra 600 coins still account for 2% or more of the machine’s overall payback percentage.
In other words, if you play with optimal strategy and only wager one coin, two coins, three coins, or four coins, a game with a 100.15% payback percentage turns into a game with about a 98% payback percentage.
6 – Know the Differences in Payback Percentage
When you play video poker, you should have some awareness of how much you expect to lose on average. It’s an easy calculation to make.
You just multiply how much you’re wagering per hand by the number of hands you’re playing per hour. You multiply that by the payback percentage to get the amount you get back. The difference is your average loss per hour.
An average video poker player plays 600 hands per hour. Assuming you’re playing on a quarter machine, you’re betting $1.25 per hand (5 coins at 25 cents each). That’s $750 per hour in action.
If you’re playing on a game with a 100.15% payback percentage, you’re getting back $751.13 back per hour on average. This means you’re winning an average of $1.13 per hour.
On a NSUD machine, with its 99.8% payback percentage, you’re getting back $748.50 per hour on average. That’s an hourly loss of $1.50.
Small differences in payback percentage can make a big difference in how much it costs to play a Deuces Wild video poker game.
Conclusion
The two main things to remember about playing Deuces Wild video poker are these:
- Always bet five coins per hand.
- Always keep any deuces you get.
Of course, it’s good to be able to distinguish between pay tables, but if you only remember those two strategy tips, you’ll be ahead of 80% of the video poker players in the casino.
This video poker strategy page and the accompanying section have a single goal—to help you get the best odds when gambling at a casino. Video poker, unlike many casino games, offers you at least some degree of control over the odds. Games like roulette and slot machines have no strategy. The decisions you make are essentially meaningless.
Video poker, on the other hand, resembles blackjack. You can use strategic thinking to improve your chances of winning and decrease the house edge. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as both games use a deck of cards to play. Of course, in the case of blackjack, you’re usually looking at a real deck of cards. In video poker, you’re using a virtual deck that’s actually being simulated using a random number generator.
But legitimate video poker games duplicate the odds you’d see if you were using a real deck of cards.
And that’s why you can use a strategy to improve your odds. We talk more about that in the next section.
Why Does Video Poker Have a Strategy?
When you’re playing a slot machine, you have no idea what the probability of a particular symbol coming up on a particular reel is. That probability is determined by the random number generator.
A random number generator is a computer program that constantly cycles through numbers at the rate of thousands of numbers per second. Each number corresponds to a different stop on the reel in a slot machine game. Or in the case of a video poker game, each number corresponds to a playing card.
But since you don’t know anything about the probability of getting a particular symbol on a slot machine game, it’s impossible to make any kind of strategic decision.
In fact, even if you DID know the probabilities of getting each symbol on the reel, you still wouldn’t be able to make a decision that would affect your outcome.
There are no decisions to be made. You put your money in, your spin the reels, and you accept the outcome.
Several, if not most, casino games are like this. You have no way of affecting the odds no matter how smart you are. The odds of winning a single number bet in roulette are 37 to 1, no matter what kind of strategy you use.
That’s why video poker (and blackjack) are different. You DO have the opportunity to make decisions which affect your outcome.
Understanding why requires looking into the math behind the game a little bit.
Expected Return, Payback Percentages & the House Edge
The expected return of a bet, video poker or otherwise, can be calculated if you know the probability of winning and losing. You also need to know how much you stand to win and how much you stand to lose.
You multiply the probability of winning by the amount you’re going to win. You multiply the probability of losing by the amount you’re going to lose. You add those two numbers together to get your overall expectation.
Suppose we set up a really simple gambling game where you’re going to flip a coin. If you guess the correct outcome, you win 25 cents. But if you’re wrong, you lose 50 cents.
In this example you have a 50% chance of winning and a 50% chance of losing. 50% of 25 cents is 12.5 cents, which is the first part of your equation. Best paying slots in las vegas. 50% of 50 cents is -25 cents. (It’s negative because that’s the amount you lose.)
12.5 cents – 25 cents = -12.5 cents
Your expected loss on that bet is 12.5 cents. Gossip slots eu.
You won’t lose 12.5 cents every time. That would be impossible.
But if you tallied all your net wins and losses over time, and if you played for a long time, your results would eventually start to conform to the mathematical expectation.
Return is usually measured as a percentage. In this case, 12.5 cents is 50% of the original bet, so your expected return is -50%.
That’s an awful bet. Most experienced gamblers wouldn’t take it.
But it’s an example of how the casino gets its edge in every game in the casino.
This same kind of math can be applied to video poker games and to slot machine games to determine a payback percentage. The payback percentage is just the amount of money you expect to win back from the casino for every $100 you wager over a long period of time.
Keep in mind that in the short run, anything can and often will happen. You can win a big jackpot early in your session, and your results won’t look anything like the mathematically expected payback percentage.
But the longer you play, the closer your results will get to the mathematically predicted results. Over an infinite number of trials, you would certainly have results which mirror the mathematical prediction.
The house edge, on the other hand, is the amount of each bet that the house mathematically expects to keep. It’s the opposite of the payback percentage.
The payback percentage added to the house edge always equals 100%. So you can calculate the house edge by subtracting the payback percentage from 100%.
In the case of a full pay Jacks or Better game, the payback percentage is 99.54%. So the house edge is 0.46%.
That means for every $100 you bet, the casino expects you to win $99.54. They expect to win 46 cents.
Those are long term expectations, though. In the short run, anything can happen.
All of that background is necessary for understanding why video poker strategy matters.
Since you know the odds of being dealt a particular hand, and you know the odds of improving a hand, you can compare your choices in a video poker game to go with the choice that has the better expected return.
You’re playing Jacks or Better, and you have 4 cards to a royal flush, but you also have a pair. You could play this hand in a number of ways.
You have a number of options in this example:
- You could throw all 5 cards away and start over. That’s obviously the play with the lowest expected value.
- You could throw away all the cards except the pair. In this case, you’re hoping to improve your hand to 2 pairs, 3 of a kind, or a full house.
- Or you could throw away the card that makes the pair and try to draw the royal flush.
Since you have a pair, you have a 100% chance of winning at least 1 unit. That’s an expected value of $1. But it’s actually a little better than that, because you also have the chance to improve the hand. Let’s just call it an expected value move of $1.50.
But a royal flush has a payout of 800 to 1. The odds of drawing the card you need for that hand are 1 in 47, but any time you get a 46 to 1 shot at an 800 to 1 payout, you should take it. The expected value of that play is huge.
You have a roughly 2% chance of winning $800. That’s $16. You also have a roughly 98% chance of losing $1. That’s -98 cents.
$16 – 98 cents = $15.02, which is a heck of a lot more than $1.50.
The correct choice is clear, even though you’re going to lose this bet more often than not. On the occasions when you do win, your winnings are going to be so large that they’ll make up for all the times you lost the bet and then some.
Not all situations in video poker are that clear. In fact, a human can’t just sit there and work out the correct play in every situation using a pencil and paper.
Luckily, we have computers for that.
You can find a video poker strategy chart for just about any variation available. In fact, you can even find websites which will generate the perfect strategy for you based on the game and the pay table that you input.
Here’s how such a strategy chart works:
- You get a list of hands.
- At the top of the list is the best possible hand.
- You work your way down the list until you find a hand that matches what you have.
- When you get to that hand, you stop and keep the cards that are listed.
Almost all video poker strategy charts start with a royal flush as the top listed hand. That makes sense. After all, you would never throw away the top paying hand in the game. That would just be silly.
In most games, 4 of a kind and a straight flush will also be at the top of the list—those are usually the top 3 hands with the best payouts.
But the next best hand after that?
You’ll always hold on to 4 cards to a royal flush.
The royal flush is the big paying hand. So you’ll go for that, even if it means breaking up a sure winner.
That’s some strategy advice based on Jacks or Better, but the strategy for Deuces Wild is a little bit different.
For one thing, you’ll always look at lists of potential hands based on how many deuces you have. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is that you never discard a 2.
Then based on how many deuces you have in your hand, you have a list of potential hands to choose from. Start at the top and work your way down.
Another way of thinking about video poker strategy is to think about potentially conflicting hands.
You have 3 cards to a royal flush, but you also have a pair. Do you keep the pair, or do you go for the royal flush?
In this case, you keep the pair. Your odds of hitting the royal flush go down exponentially when you need 2 cards to complete your hand.
How do you know that?Probability.
In probability, when you want to know the odds of event A happening AND event B happening at the same time, you multiple the probabilities by each other.
In the event of filling a royal flush, each card has a 1/47 chance of showing up. The odds of getting both cards are 1/47 X 1/47, which is about 1 in 2500. And 800 to 1 payout doesn’t warrant that kind of risk, especially if you’ve got a sure winning in your hand already.
The strategy varies from game to game because the payouts vary from game to game. In Bonus Poker, which is basically just Jacks or Better with a bonus payout for a 4 of a kind, you might be more likely to draw to your 4 of a kind in certain instances.
In Deuces Wild, the presence of the wild card makes a huge difference to how you play your hands. You need much stronger hands to win, but those wild cards make it easier to get those hands. One of the fundamental tenets of Deuces Wild strategy is to never discard a deuce.
Jacks or Better
The basics of Jacks or Better strategy are pretty simple.
First check to see if you have one of the following 3 paying hands:
If you have any of those, keep what you’ve got and collect your winnings.
If you don’t have any of those, check to see if you have 4 cards to a royal flush. If you do, keep those 4 cards and try to hit the royal.
4 cards to a royal flush trumps everything except those 3 hands we mentioned above.
If you don’t have 4 cards to a royal flush, then look to see if you have any of these other “made hands”:
- Full House
- Flush
- Straight
- 3 of a Kind
If you have any of those, keep it and collect your winnings.
If not, check to see if you have 4 cards to a straight flush. If you do, then draw to that straight flush.
Then check to see if you have one of the following 2 paying hands:
You’ll keep those over the other options below.
![Deuces Deuces](https://pnimg.net/w/articles/0/5bf/6bf3ddf40e.png)
Once you get to that point, you’re looking at speculative hands. Your best speculative hand at this point is 3 cards to a royal flush. It’s a long shot, but if you don’t already have one of the other hands listed above, that’s what you should go for.
Then if you have 4 to a flush, try to fill your flush.
If you have a low pair, try to draw to 3 of a kind or better.
A full strategy chart will have several more hands for you to go through, but you get the idea.
Jacks or Better strategy just isn’t that hard. Even though this isn’t a complete strategy chart, you’re probably only giving up a few tenths of a percent of payback percentage following these guidelines.
Our guide to Jacks or Better video poker covers the correct strategy in more detail.
Content
If you have 4 deuces, you’ll keep them.
If you have 3 deuces, you’ll keep them. You’re hoping for a royal flush.
If you have 2 deuces, you’ll keep both of them. You’ll hope for a 4 of a kind or better, but if you don’t have that, try for a royal flush or a straight flush.
If you only have one deuce, strategy gets a little harder. But it’s still just a list to go down:
Deuces Wild 44 Strategy
- 4 of a Kind or better
- 4 to a Royal Flush
- Full House
- 4 to a Straight Flush
- Flush, Straight, or 3 of a Kind
- 3 to a Royal Flush
And so on.
The payback percentages for Deuces Wild games are all over the place. Unlike Jacks or Better, which has an easy to understand system for adjusting the payback percentage, Deuces Wild pay tables can vary quite a bit from one another.
Your best bet, when choosing a Deuces Wild game, is to use some kind of online tool to determine the payback percentage for the game with the pay table you’re considering.
For a detailed discussion of Deuces Wild strategy, please see our page on Deuces Wild video poker.
The optimal strategy for Bonus Poker, which offers a bonus payout for 4 of a kind hands, is so similar to the optimal strategy for Jacks or Better as to be almost indistinguishable.
If you just used the same strategy, you’d probably be giving up less than 0.2%.
It is good to know how to play Bonus Poker, though, because in many of today’s casinos, it’s the video poker game with the highest payout percentage.
We have an entire page dedicated to Bonus Poker, and it includes detailed strategy advice.
Deuces Wild Optimal Strategy
Joker Poker
Joker Poker has some similarities to Deuces Wild, but it’s not as complicated. You’ll only ever see a single joker in the deck, which changes the texture of the possible hands considerably.
You’ll basically be presented with 2 basic strategy charts—one to follow if your hand includes a joker, and one to follow if it doesn’t. The differences are subtle in some cases, but it’s not too complicated.
Deuces Wild Optimal Strategy
We offer a full page on Joker Poker, too, which also includes a detailed discussion of the correct strategy for playing that game.
Video poker strategy resembles basic strategy in blackjack in many ways. They both represent the optimal way of playing every possible hand you could get.
Of course, the differences are obvious, too. Your goals in video poker are quite different from your goals in blackjack.
Most video poker strategy is just presented as a list. You start at the top, work your way down, and stop when you get to the hand that matches what you’re holding in your hand. Then you keep the appropriate cards and move on.
Deuces Wild Strategy
We offer detailed strategies for almost all of the video poker games on our site on the appropriate pages. Please visit this page for a complete list of all the games we cover.
You may also be interested the following pages. These cover a range of subjects related to video poker strategy.
Video Poker Strategy Articles
Bonus Deuces Wild Strategy
- Video Poker Trainers
- Video Poker for Winner
- Video Poker Bankroll
- Video Poker Books
- Video Poker Cheat Sheets
- Video Poker Calculators
- Video Poker Comps
- Video Poker Double Up Feature
- Video Poker EV (Expected Value)
- Video Poker Hands and Hand Analyzers
- Video Poker House Edge
- Video Poker Lessons
- Video Poker Odds and Probability
- Video Poker Royal Flush Odds & Strategy
- Video Poker Risk of Ruin and Variance
- Video Poker Tutorial
- Bob Dancer: Video Poker Expert
- Jean Scott: The Frugal Gambler