I think you would agree that the above procedure results in a fair game because each card in the deck has the same probability of being selected. After I paid you (assuming you had a winning hand), I would collect all the cards, put them in one 52-card stack, and start shuffling them again for the next hand. If your five-card hand contains a pair of jacks or higher poker hand, I’d pay you an amount based upon a pay schedule of winning hands that I would have shown you before we started playing video poker. I would remove the two cards in your hand that you want to discard and place them aside, stop shuffling, and give you the top card from the 47-card shuffled deck and place it face up in position four in your hand, and the next card in the my shuffled stacked would be face up in position five in your hand.

Let’s suppose that you tell me that you want to hold the first three cards in your hand. While you are looking at your five-card hand to determine which cards you want to hold, I’ll continue to shuffle the remaining 47 cards in my hand. If we were to play a game of video poker on a kitchen table with a deck of playing cards, how would we do it so that the game is honest? Suppose you make a bet and I take a standard 52-card deck, shuffle it, and then randomly select five cards from the shuffled deck and place them face up on the table. If you believe that casinos can do this, you definitely need to read what I’m about to say about this.įirst, let me ask you this question. They believe that casinos can somehow rig the cards in a video poker machine to make it harder to get a winning hand. It turns out that the above was not the first, or the last question, I’ll get from players about “rigged video poker machines.” Many players, especially those who play slots, have an uneasy feeling about playing video poker machines. I received an email from a video poker player who asked me this question:

Can video poker machines be rigged