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.