The best Vegas Video Poker is The Palms because of its consistent offerings of high return machines.

On the Strip, no major casinos have positive expectation games but Wynn has a reasonable comps program and inventory of near 100% return games. We also rank it as one of the best overall casinos for large bankroll players.

Hilton has a very large selection of decent machines near their best-in-Vegas Sports Book. Venetian also has acceptable machines and a better than average comps program (for the Strip).

Downtown, Main Street Station and Fremont have some good Video Poker inventory and Main Street Station comps redeem very well. El Cortez has some 100%+ return games but they are often occupied.

Main Factors:

• Paytables
• Playing Strategy
• Maximum Coin Play
• Comps

Some Vegas Video Poker machines have long-term expected returns of over 100%--player has the Edge.

Here are some Full Pay returns for Vegas casinos:

• Deuces Wild (FPDW) 100.76%
• Joker Poker, Kings or Better 100.65%
• Double Bonus (DB) 100.17%
• Double Double Bonus (DDB) 100.07%

The Royal Flush will be about 2% of your return. If you do not hit it, you will probably have a negative return unless you are hitting bonus hands or other big hands.

A Royal Flush cycle is the number of hands until hitting the Royal which will average about every 40,000 hands or so. It varies by a few thousand hands game to game because your playing strategy will be less Royal-centric in games with bonus hands and more Royal-centric where you need to go after the Royal.

Below are the odds for getting a Royal. Each card needed to make a Royal is calculated separately and then multiplied together to get the odds. This is available as a Google spreadsheet.

Any 10,J,Q,K or A on your first card, gives you a chance at a Royal with odds of 20 out of 52 total cards in the deck. The next card has to be the same suit so you only have 4 out of 51 chances, etc. and then finally 1 out of 48 cards for the last card.

If all your cards are lower than a 10 and you discard them all, there will only be 47 cards left in the deck. The odds of drawing a Royal after discarding all 5 dealt cards is 383,484.8 to 1 while it is 47 to 1 if you start with 4 cards to the Royal.

Odds for a Joker game are also shown. For example, if you have 2 cards to a Natural Royal (No Jokers or wild cards) the odds are 17,296 to 1 against you making a Natural Royal while the odds are 16,215 to 1 in a 52 card deck.

53 to 54. All the other odds will automatically change.

Five Main Factors:

1. Find best Paytable.

2. Make sure buttons aren’t sticky.

3. Insert Player’s Card or get one if you don’t have it already.

4. Bet maximum coins—almost always 5. For very High Limit, find casino host to monitor for W2G processing.

5. Play Optimum Video Poker strategy for your specific game.

Net Present Value or the value in today’s dollars for optimal play is surprisingly large for a Video Poker player over some numbers of years.

Although we show a simplified version of FPDW so you can get a rough idea of what strategy play looks like, we strongly recommend the full blown, accurate strategy from Bob Dancer first, or Jean Scott, a close second.