The Hand Frequency and Cost of Playing Video Poker

Many poker experts suggest that video poker players should look at the pay table to ensure that the video poker machine they will be playing is one with the highest payout. However less poker players also know that the pay table not only provides them an indication on how much they can possibly win but also how much they will expect to spend from playing a hand on a video poker machine.

One can calculate their average expenses for playing a particular hand in a video poker machine through the information that can be obtained from the video poker hand frequency. This is relative information as to how many hands are needed to be played for a particular poker hand to occur.

Initially one can begin their calculation by learning the average hands that can be played from playing a deck consisting of 52 cards. This will give a player a good perspective on the frequency of drawing a particular hand including the percentage that it contributes from the expected return of the game.

A player can win as much as 4,000 coins when playing for the royal flush with the maximum bet of 5 coins. The hand frequency of playing a hand basically involves the mathematical probability for a specific hand to occur.

In theory the player who is playing for the royal flush should take into account that they need to play a hand frequency of at least 40,000 hands for the royal flush to occur. This is a large number of hands to play which involve long term playing of the video poker machine.

Taken into account is the number of hours that a player plays the video poker machine and how many hands they can play for each hour in order to reach the 40,000 hand plays.

If the player is an average video poker player it takes them to play at least 400 hands an hour. Hence they are required to play at least 100 hours to reach playing 40,000 hands for the royal flush. This will involve several trips to the video poker machine to satisfy this hour requirement of playing the 40,000 hands.

A player can spend $1.25 for each hand when they play a video poker at a quarter denomination machine at the maximum coins. They need to put through a total of $50,000 at 40,000 hands. One gets an expected return of 99.5% with a perfect strategy. The total cost of a player to play this number of hands will be $250 ($50,000 x 0.05).

If a player does not hit a royal with this number of hands, adding the overall return of the game which is 1.98% to the base game of 0.05% which totals to 2.48% the player will be spending a total of 2.48% x $50,000 which is equivalent to $1,240 in order for a player to play the 40,000 hands.

Playing this big number of hands at a higher cost may seem impractical for an occasional poker player to go after the royal flush. Hence it is wise to play for a poker hand with a lower hand frequency such as a full house that occurs once in every 86 numbers of hands in order to hit a realistic goal when playing the game of video poker.