Expected Value

One way of looking at it is to calculate the expected value for each hand. There are 52 cards in a deck, there are 2,598,960 possible five-card poker hands, but because the order of the cards nor the suite is important in poker, as for example, an K-Q-J-7-7 of diamonds is the exact equivalent of K-Q-J-7-7 of spades the possible unique hands comes down to 134,459.

There are thirty-two possible ways to play any dealt five-card hand.

• You can hold all five cards (that’s one way),
• hold four cards and draw one (obviously there are five possible one-card discards),
• hold three cards and draw two (there are ten possible combinations for a two-card discard), ,
• hold two cards and draw three (again ten possibilities)
• hold one card and draw four (there are five ways to hold just one card),
• discard all five cards.

If you add all of these combinations together, the total comes to 32 different possible strategies for your poker hand. If you want to learn to play the best possible strategies in video poker you will need to get some practise at one of the many online casinos offering free play which you will find on this site. Once the games suite is on your computer, you can play video poker whenever you want. No more waiting ‘til you have saved enough money for a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City.

Posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 15:12