Instructive Hands for Playing Deuces and Joker Wild Video Poker

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In the video poker world, the difficulty of wild card games is generally determined by the density of wilds in the deck. With five wilds in a 53-card deck, Deuces and Joker Wild has the highest density of wilds of any popular type of video poker making it the most difficult to play. With its low payouts on the bottom end of the scale paired with the massive 2,000x payout for five wild cards in your hand, it can be difficult to find the right strategies. We have three instructive hands that should help you out.

Let's start with QQJT9 with no flush draw. Here there are two main approaches. First, you could keep the pair, or you could keep the open-ended straight draw. In some games, it's a clear pick for one or the other, but in Deuces and Joker Wild, it's actually kind of close. Picking the pair is better by a fine margin of about one percent of your bet size, and this goes for all other situations where you have no wild cards and a choice between a pair and an open-ended straight draw.

Now let's look at a similar situation. Suppose we have K9963 except this time we do have a flush draw. The value of playing with the pair is about 0.552 meaning that we will average a payout of about 55.2 percent of our bet size. However, keeping the flush draw is worth about 0.813, or about 81.3 percent of our bet size. Having so many wilds is compensated for the fact that the payout for a flush is just 3x in this game. However, the payout for three of a kind is just 1x, and there is no payout for two pair, so the value of keeping a pair is minimal at best.

Finally, let's look at a situation that gives people a lot of trouble. Suppose we have AKQ53 with a flush draw where the 3 is a different suit than the other four cards. Most people will play the flush draw here for the 0.813 payout just like in the above hand. However, keeping the three-card royal is a better play with an average payout of 1.201 meaning 120.1 percent of your bet size. This is better than keeping the flush draw by a factor of about 50 percent, so it's clear to see that not doing so is a big mistake.

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