The key to safe and enjoyable casino gaming is to approach it with the right attitude. Play for fun, accept that, like any form of entertainment, it will cost you some money and only bet what you can afford to lose.
A casino is a business, just like a restaurant or a night club. It has salaries to pay and shareholders to satisfy, and it makes its money by ensuring that on average, wagers staked exceed winnings paid out.
The house edge
Every game has a house edge, which reflects this difference. For example, in European roulette, it is 2.7 percent. It means that if 100 people each wager $100 on roulette, some will walk away winners, some will end the night down, but the average will be a 2.7 percent loss, and the casino will be approximately $270 up in total. Likewise, a slot game with a house edge of three percent will generate about $300 for the casino if 100 players each bet $100.
The house edge is what keeps a casino in business, but where things get interesting is when that house edge can change according to the skill of the player. This doesn’t happen with slots or roulette, but can be a factor in card games. Play perfect blackjack strategy, and the house edge is less than one percent, compared to about three percent for someone with only a vague gameplan.
Video poker
In video poker, strategy is all about which cards you hold and which you discard. Playing the perfect strategy every time is only part of the story, though. You also need to make sure you are playing at what is called a full pay table. Each video poker game has “full pay” or optimum rewards for particular hands. In Jacks or Better, full pay offers 9-1 for a Full House and 6-1 for a Flush. In Deuces Wild, you need to check the payouts for Five of a Kind, Straight Flush and Four of a Kind. These are 15-1, 9-1 and 5-1 on a full pay table.
Choosing the best casino
In short, before you even start playing, you need to do some research on what is the best online casino for real money gambling. If video poker is your game of choice, one of the first things to check is that it is offering full pay odds as outlined above. However, you should also take the opportunity to verify other aspects, such as the payment methods the casino accepts, the levels of customer service and whether there are any bonus offers that can be applied to their video poker games.
Honing your strategy
The next step is to hone your strategy. Statistically, deuces wild gives you the best opportunity to beat the house, as with a perfect strategy, the house edge disappears into negative territory. In other words, make the perfect decision every time and you will win more than you lose.
How can casinos allow that to happen? Quite simply, Deuces Wild is a complicated game, and having the wild cards in play offers up so many possibilities that you would have to be a real expert to get it right every time. Casinos know that the majority of players will not, and so in the long run, the casino will still emerge with a profit.
However, for those who are prepared to put in the hard work, research and practice, video poker, and specifically the Deuces Wild variation, represents the one game where it is possible to play with an advantage over the house.
