Multi Hand Video Poker

Multi-hand video poker is a video poker game that allows you to play more than one hand at a time. Different machines allow you to play different numbers of hands – up to 100 hands at a time in many casino – but are the odds of winning on a multi-hand machine any different than when playing regular video poker?

Before we answer that question, let’s look at the game itself. You begin by choosing the number of hands you wish to play by clicking one of the numbers across the bottom of the video poker screen: usually 1, 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100. Next, you place a bet. Because these machines are multi-denominational, they accepts bets ranging from pennies to pounds. When the bet is selected, you click the Deal button. If you decide to play the maximum coin amount, just click Bet Max for five credits for every hand you choose to play.

After you have pressed the Deal button, you will be presented with five cards. On the screen, each hand you are playing (from the 1st to the 100th) will contain these same five cards. Just as in conventional online video poker, you choose your keepers. All of the favourable cards you choose to hold from the initial hand are copied to each remaining hand played. When you are ready to draw new cards, click the Deal button again.

For each hand you have paid to play, a random set of replacement cards is drawn. In order to show 100 hands on a video screen, each hand has to be quite small, making it all but impossible for anyone to keep track of what's going on as 100 hands simultaneously play out at high speed. Fortunately, when all of the hands have been dealt the machine will highlight all of your winners and display both the amount returned and the total accumulated credits. In addition, at the bottom of each winning hand, a colour-coded bar will appear, indicating the type of hand and coins won. On many machines a corresponding chart is displayed in a bottom corner of the screen, and this shows you how many of each type of winning hands you have hit.

The odds for multi-hand video poker are the same as for the single-hand version. Playing each hand multiple times magnifies how much you win or lose, but only because you turning over more money per game – the odds themselves don't change. This means that any strategies you use for optimising your return at a single hand game will carry over to multi-hand video poker games, as long as you shop for the best pay tables.

So, is there a downside to multi-hand video poker? Unfortunately, yes. The more hands you play per hour, the more you subject your gambling funds to the house edge. Though you are only playing one hand of video poker, you are getting 100 different results on the draw, each subject to a built-in casino advantage. And although multi-hand video poker can increase your earning potential on good hands, it also magnifies your losing potential on bad hands, evaporating your bankroll very quickly.

If you are playing 5-coin single-handed video poker at 25p a throw and your are dealt “junk”, all you have at stake is 25p. With multi-hand play you would have much more invested in those same awful cards. Even if you were betting pennies, you could be losing £5 per play with 100 hands, and that’s a lot more than 25p on a single-hand machine.

For those of us who like to play video poker, multi-hand video poker gives us the ability to play many more hands per hour than we could with a single hand machine. However, whether that works for or against us all depends on the cards we are dealt and how we choose to play them.

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