"Full Pay"
For a professional, or serious even, video poker player this is the Holy Grail of machines. One with a pay table that signifies you're somewhere in the range of a 99% to even over 100% payback. Here's what they look like for certain games....
9/6 Jacks or Better
8/5 Bonus Poker
9/6 Bonus Deluxe
10/7 Double Bonus Poker
10/6 Double Double Bonus Poker
9/7 Triple Double Bonus Poker
There are other games out there for sure, even some games, such as Deuces Wild, that offer full pay variants, but the one's above are what I would consider to be the most "popular" games that you can typically find across a broad spectrum of casinos/machines, including both bar top (my favorite) and floor machines.
Before we go any further here I want to get one thing clear (a thing that's going to be missed by almost everyone reading this blog. But, here we go.....
I LOVE FULL PAY MACHINES. I do, and I search them out wherever I can find them. As someone who spends 95% of time in a casino sitting in front of a video poker machine pay-tables are very, very, extremely important to me.
But they might not be to you, and let me explain why.
1. "Full Pay" means over the life of the machine. It does not mean that you're going to lose less money in any one given session. Because of this, if you're playing many long sessions over the course of a casino trip (i.e. like me) then the more you play the more the pay table will come into effect. Because the more hands you see etc. But let's say you only go to a casino once or twice per year, usually play Black Jack and only play VP (Video Poker) for an hour or so when you're sitting at the bar having drinks. In all honesty your wins and losses are not going to come from the pay table, but from whether or not you hit any "premium hands" (i.e. 4 of a kind or better) during the limited time that you are playing.
2. "Full Pay" comes with the caveat that perfect strategy must be employed. I'm not sure about others, but I will freely admit that I DO NOT, EVER play with absolutely perfect strategy. I believe that I play with ADVANCED strategy, but either due to fatigue, a vodka soda (with lime) or two or the simple fact that I am a human being and therefore make mistakes, I will never attain perfection. IMO anyone who claims this is a liar. But there's also basic and advanced strategy as well. To gain a benefit out of any pay table my feeling is that you AT LEAT have to have a pretty solid mastery of the intermediate strategy of the game. I'm not suggesting that you play intermediate perfect and never make a mistake, but an overwhelming majority of the time (say around 95%) you are making the correct play as the strategy allows. Even this type of play on basic strategy will help some, but I believe that intermediate strategy is the cut-off for a perceptible difference in results.
3. Even WITH perfect strategy, you're playing a negative expectation game. Yes, there are a few caveats to this: Full Pay Double Bonus Poker and Double Double Bonus Poker actually have theoretical returns above 100%, and you could even find some of the other games bumped up above that for a promotion, and there are times when a progressive gets high enough that the TR (Theoretical Return) is drug over 100% but these are the exception not the rule, and you're unlikely to find them many places in the wild. The further you deviate from perfect strategy however the higher the house edge is getting. My point is that without strategy VP can be one of the worst games in the casino.
4. You're likely spending most of your bankroll elsewhere. From that perspective video poker is not your game. You might like to play it and you might hit big from time to time, but overall you'd be better served mastering the strategies of the games you like to play (IF, that is, they have a strategy that is complex enough to be mastered). That said, it doesn't take too long to gain a working understanding of basic strategy, and even knowing that will help you to play better (and get better hands) in the long-term. So even if you only play a little don't discount learning some strategy. But save your real work for learning Black Jack strategy, or card counting if that's your thing.
Listen, I'm not suggesting that you run out and go find the worst pay tables that you can and sit down on those machines because well, who cares? Not at all. What I am saying is that, if you're a casual VP players, don't let the quest for finding the "best" pay table ruin your day. Yes, if you find two games of DDB (Double Double Bonus) and one is 9/5* and one is 8/5, and they're both open and right next to each other then, certainly, you're not real smart if you pick the 8/5 game all other things being equal. Be aware, but don't obsess over it.
On the Las Vegas Strip the harsh reality is that there are very few "good" VP pay tables and you're probably going to be relegated to playing something foul such as 6/5 BP (Bonus Poker) or 7/5 DDB at the quarter level. For me, these games are why I very, very rarely play VP on the Strip but, for you? If you're sitting with friends and having a good time? You should probably not feel too bad about just lining them up and banging away.
After all, the BEST pay table is a winning pay table, and that's the machine on which you actually get premium quads**, straight flushes or the Royal Flush.
Final reminder: Gambling is a cost of entertainment. Even if you learn advanced strategy and play as near perfect as you can on the best pay tables every time, you're still going to have more losing sessions than winning ones.
This is doubly true for a recreational player. Have fun, try and hit some premium hands and just generally consider VP to be an entertainment option for you. Don't waste your time running around a casino looking for "the best pay table" because 1. This could take some time and you don't want to spend your time working on vacation, and 2. It's probably not going to do you much good even if you do find it. At the most, check all of the games on one machine and find the best one and play it. But the "best" machine is the winning machine, and don't forget that the winning machine is the one on which you hit premium hands.
Unfortunately they've yet to develop a (legal) system for finding those.
*A pay table is rated by the value placed on a single unit bet on the full house and the flush. So, if the Full house pay tables shows a 9 and the Flush a 5 then the game is 9/5. This is true for all "non-wild" games. Once you learn this it's pretty easy to determine the pay table and then, you can go to many sites and see just how much of the house edge the variant you are playing is adding to the house edge.
**Premium Quads are defined here as being quad combinations that pay higher than the "base" payout for 4OAK (4 of a kind). Some examples of this would be 4-2s, 3s, 4s (200 credits) in Bonus Poker where 4 5-Ks only pays 150 or 4 Aces w/any Ace,2,3,4 (2000 credits) in DDB where 4 5s-Ks pays out 250 credits. There are many more examples of this in many games, just look at the pay table and look for any 4 of a kind combo that pays higher than the base (usually 5s-Ks but not always)
