Joker Wild online
video poker is an extremely popular
video poker game. There are even versions of Joker Wild
video poker with a payback of over 100%. That
expectation is theoretical, of course, and depends on
optimum play, but that aspect makes the game much more ecxiting and challenging.
Joker Wild video poker is a version of online Five Card
Draw. Joker is a wild card. Each hand begins
with a shuffled deck containing one joker. Since a
shuffled deck including a joker has totally 53 cards,
and since a five card hand is roughly one tenth of the
cards, the joker on the average will appear once in every
ten hands.
In online Joker Wild video poker you’ll receive five
cards face up. You have to decide which cards to keep
and which ones to discard. For the cards you want to
keep you either click a “Hold” button or click on the
cards themselves. Once you have determined which cards
you want to hold, you click “Deal” and the discarded
cards will be replaced with new ones from the shoe.
If you have a joker, it is
automatically assigned a value that maximizes your hand.
If the hand you’re dealt has the joker, a good
strategy is to keep hands that are Three of a kind or
higher, unless you have four cards to a Royal flush. In
that case your odds are better even if you discard a
paying hand of lower value. You are, of course, still
taking a risk.
Also keep in mind that the joker is a part of the
combination. If you have the joker and say two
jacks, in online Joker Wild video poker you have
Three of a kind.
The full pay Joker Wild video poker pay table looks
like this and has a theoretical payout of 100.64%.
| Hand |
Payout |
|
Royal flush (natural) |
800:1 |
| Five of a kind |
200:1 |
|
Royal flush with a wild card |
100:1 |
|
Straight flush |
50:1 |
|
Four of a kind |
20:1 |
|
Full house |
7:1
|
|
Flush |
5:1 |
|
Straight |
3:1 |
|
Three of a kind |
2:1 |
| Two
pair |
1:1 |
|
Kings or better
| 1:1 |
There are other pay tables used in online Joker Wild
video poker. Sometimes the highest payouts are on
the top two hands rather than just the top one, but
payouts drop off for the hands in the middle of the
chart. Some players are willing to take the bigger risk for a
double top payout. On some of these pay tables a
Pair of kings or aces is a losing hand, rather
than a
“break even” hand.
There are other pay tables with bigger drops in the
middle tier of payouts, like for Four of a kind and Full
house. These video
poker games have theoretical payouts
of only 95.5% or so. You can avoid them by memorizing
the Full Pay Joker Wild video poker pay table. That way
you can compare the middle tier payouts – the hands
which occur much more often than the top tier hands –
and choose the table with the best combination of top
tier and middle tier payouts.
