Extreme X Video Poker Guide
When it comes to online video poker, Extreme X video poker makes for one of the most interesting twists for multipliers (hence the “X” in the game title). Unlike other games, you can choose when you want your multiplier to be applied. Throughout your gameplay, you’ll be making decisions that could either amp up your winnings or diminish them greatly.
Many people prefer video poker to other games in casinos or gambling websites because of how easy it is to play and because the payback rivals the very best table games. But one of the biggest complaints of the most basic form of video poker is that it’s too difficult to score a big payoff on a single hand. The game is set up in a way where you have to grind out your winnings, and many people don’t have the patience for that kind of gameplay.
Bonus pay tables, which significantly boosted the payback for four of a kind hands, were created to appeal to just that kind of gambler. So too were video poker games which added a basic twist to gameplay. One of the most common twists is the use of multipliers which, as the name implies, allows players to multiply their normal winnings from a hand by a predetermined amount.
Extreme X video poker takes all of that one step further. It allows you to play any one of a variety of pay tables, allowing you to set up the style of play to your liking. And it allows you the chance to add an extra bet each hand which will activate a multiplier extra feature. That multiplier comes into play any time you manage to draw to a hand of a full house or better during gameplay.
Most video poker games assign multipliers for so many hands, but Extreme X video poker adds a decision-making element to the situation. You decide when you want a multiplier of six or seven times your winning amount applied. But the trick is that you have only one shot to use that multiplier within five so-called fever hands that the game allots to you, after which you return to normal play.
In Extreme X video poker, you have to decide if you want to use the multiplier on a small-paying winning hand to avoid the risk of losing it. Or you can try to hold out during the fever hands until you can really get a substantial winning hand, thereby maximizing the amount of money that you can get from the multipliers. The decision adds an interesting strategic level to gameplay that will appeal to those who like a challenge, all while containing the traditional multiplier element that draws in people who want the chance to make a lot of money off just a few hands of video poker.
In the following article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about Extreme X video poker, first by showing you to play basic video poker, then by going over the Extreme X twist. We’ll also go over all of the different pay tables that you can play and talk about how the twist to the game affects payback percentage. And we’ll also go into how you can learn strategy for this challenging and rewarding form of video poker.
Basic Video Poker Gameplay
Extreme X video poker gets a little bit involved in terms of extra bets and multiplier gameplay. That’s why it’s a good idea for you to first learn how to play video poker at its most basic level. By doing that, you can then move up to the more complex game without any trouble.
Video poker, as we briefly mentioned above, is a favorite at many casinos and on gambling websites. There are many reasons to love the game and very few drawbacks. And you can try out different forms of the game, such as Extreme X video poker, by just browsing your local casino or a gambling website to see which one fits you best.
Some people think that video poker is a kind of slot machine because both machines are generally in the same part of the casino away from table games. But, in actuality, video poker is a much better game in many ways. To start, it’s a game where you can apply some strategy, something slot machines don’t allow you to do.
Slot machines also leave you in the dark about your chances of winning. You have no idea about how often winning spins are scheduled to show up during gameplay. And you have no way to tell how much one slot machine is scheduled to pay back on average compared to others right next to it in the casino.
Video poker is governed by probabilities, which takes the guesswork out of the equation. Because there are only 52 cards in a deck, you know how often you can expect to make any one of the winning hands on the pay table. And using the payouts from the pay tables in conjunction with those probabilities, you can also figure out the exact percentage the machine you’re playing will pay out on average.
In those respects, video poker has a lot in common with table games, which are also governed by probabilities. Yet table games require you to intermingle with other gamblers and casino employees, which can be an intimidating prospect at times. With video poker, it’s just you at a machine, playing at your own pace with no one to bother you.
The ultimate deciding factor with casino games may be payback levels, since you shouldn’t be gambling at games where the advantage is decidedly in the house’s favor. And the good news is that the best video poker games rank favorably with the best table games and easily outpace even the best slot machines. On the whole, it’s hard to find too many arguments against playing online video poker, including Extreme X video poker.
That’s why, if you haven’t done so already, you really should learn how to play. It’s not difficult at all. In fact, read this step-by-step tutorial and you should be up and playing hands of video poker online in no time.
Step 1: Building the Bankroll
In order to win money playing Extreme X video poker in casinos or on gambling websites, you have to put money at stake. The money that you put at stake is your bankroll, which you’ll establish by putting money into the machine at the start of your session. If you plan on playing video poker online, you have to first create an account then fund your account via credit card or other payment method.
When you start up a bankroll, you’ll notice that it won’t show up on the machine in terms of the money you enter. Instead, you will see that it is rendered in the form of “credits” or “coins.” Each credit or coin will be equal to the unit of the denomination for the machine you are playing.
Some machines let you choose the denomination, while others have it already determined. Your total number of credits will be equal to the amount of money that you enter divided by the denomination. For example, $10 in a quarter machine will give you 40 credits (10 divided by .25).
Step 2: Making the Bet
To play a hand of video poker, you’ll have to make a bet. Most games give you the chance to bet between one and five credits, with five credits also being known as the “max bet.” In the case of Extreme X video poker, you will also have the option of betting a sixth credit, which will allow you to play with the multiplier twist.
Many novice players think that it is a good idea to toggle between bet amounts in an attempt to guess when they are going to have a winning hand and bet accordingly. This is an ill-advised strategy for a number of reasons. For one, your chances of winning at online video poker never change, no matter if you’ve lost a thousand hands in a row or won a thousand in a row. So, there is no point in trying to guess which hands you’ll win.
On top of that, your payback percentage maxes out when you bet the maximum amount. When playing games where the max bet is five coins, you should bet that amount because you will get the richest payout for the Royal Flush hand. In the case of Extreme X video poker, betting the sixth coin actually raises your expected payback from a normal max bet, which is why you should do it if at all possible.
It is understandable if your budget doesn’t allow you to bet the maximum amount every time. But you should choose a machine with a denomination that allows you to do it. Otherwise you will be short-changing yourself.
Step 3: Playing the Hand
Have you ever played the card game known as five card draw? If you have, you’ll quickly have a grasp of how a hand of video poker works. You get a five-card deal, then you get one chance to improve your hand by discarding cards you think are useless and having them replaced with others from the same deck which dealt you originally.
When playing five card draw, the idea is to build a hand that beats everybody else at the table, although you can also bluff your way to a win. In video poker, there are no other players and no bluffs. You are simply trying to build a hand that is determined to be a winning one by the particular pay table that you’re playing.
What are those winning hands? Well, not all pay tables are uniform in terms of which hands you must make to get some sort of payback. But most video poker games, including Extreme X video poker, feature the following winning hands:
- Pair of jacks or better
- Two pair
- Three of a kind
- Straight (five cards of consecutive rank, like 3-4-5-6-7)
- Flush (five cards of same suit)
- Full house (three of a kind and two pair in the same hand)
- Four of a kind
- Straight flush (straight with five cards of same suit)
- Royal flush (ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of the same suit)
When you make your bet, five cards will appear on the screen. Your chances of getting any particular card are the same as if you were playing with a 52-card deck at home. The hope is that the deal provides you with a winning combination of cards or at least something very close to it.
But you aren’t completely out of luck if you don’t have a winning hand right away. You can also come up with a winning hand on the draw. That is the part of the game where you choose certain cards (if any) to discard and have them replaced by others from the deck.
How do you make these choices? Well, you have to think about the probabilities you have of drawing to certain winning hands based on what you’ve been dealt. You also have to take into account the potential winnings attached to these hands, going through a kind of risk-reward scenario for every deal that you receive.
In many cases, the decision will be easy. But there might be some hands that are trickier than others. Take a look at this hand:
There are many different ways you can go with this hand. You can keep the pair of sevens in the hope of improving to something like two pair, three of a kind, a full house, or even four of a kind. With the four through seven, you are only one card away from a straight, needing a three or an eight to complete it.
Finally, with the four, five, and seven of diamonds, you have an outside chance at a straight flush, one of the top-paying hands in the game. This is a particularly tough call, and it could even depend on the pay table which is the right way to go. Once you make your choice, the computer will draw the necessary cards for you and the hand will be over, with any winnings added to your total.
If you’d like to play another hand, just repeat the steps for as long as you wish to continue. Or you can cash out your winnings at any point to redeem them for money. You would need to insert more money into the machine if you run out of credits.
That is pretty much how it works. Easy, right? Now, let’s take a closer look at how Extreme X video poker adds a twist to the action.
The Extreme X Twist
The first decision you have to make when playing Extreme X video poker is deciding which pay table you’d like to play. We’ll go over the specifics of each below. Once you have that decision made, you then have to decide if you are going to play the game normally with a bet of one though five coins, or if you are going to employ the special feature by betting a sixth coin.
All video poker games are judged by their payback percentages. Playing the sixth coin adds to the payback percentages of every pay table that you can play. For one example, the Jacks or Better pay table listed below normally returns 98.45% to the player, but that total jumps to 99.94% when you add the extra feature, so we recommend it.
Let’s say that you do decide to go with the Extreme X video poker twist and that you are playing that Jacks or Better pay table. You will bet six coins per hand. When one of those hands ends up with a full house or higher hand (four of a kind, straight flush, or royal flush), you’ll receive five hands which are known as fever hands.
In the case of the Jacks or Better pay table, the multiplier that comes into play for those fever hands is seven times. There are certain games within the Extreme X video poker family where the multiplier is six times for those hands. For those who don’t know how a multiplier works, imagine that you win a hand that is normally worth 10 coins, but you have a seven times multiplier:
10 coins times 7 = 70 coins
That is a pretty hefty boost. During the five fever hands, you can apply it to any winning hand lower than a full house or higher. If you get a full house or higher during the fever hands, the multiplier is automatically applied and you start a new round of five fever hands, repeating the process until it is complete.
If you don’t get a full house or higher during the fever round, you have to choose when the multiplier will be used. You only get to use it once, at which point the fever round is over, and play goes back to normal. If you don’t use it by the time the five hands are up, you lose the multiplier.
This means that you have a choice to make. Imagine that you end up with a pair of jacks or better on the first fever hand. You can take the multiplier right off the bat, which would be the normal amount of 5 coins multiplied by 7 for a total of 35 coins won.
If you go that route, you are assured of the multiplier being used. But you have no way of knowing what the other hands might have held. For example, you might have accomplished a flush in one of the four remaining hands, which would have given you a total of 175 coins (7 times 25).
Of course, had you held out for the bigger hand, you might have gone four more hands in a row without coming up with a winning hand. That would have forfeited your multipliers. It’s a tough call in terms of deciding when to apply the multipliers.
In any case, the multipliers really add to your chances of winning big. And that’s especially the case if you can somehow manage a hand of a full house or better during the fever rounds. You would get the huge multiplier out of that, plus another five fever hands to get more multipliers into play.
The downside is that, if you don’t get lucky enough to activate the multipliers, you will be paying six coins for winnings that are based on a five-coin bet. That makes it hard to sustain your bankroll. Like we said, the overall effect on your payback percentage will be a positive one, but you’ll have to decide if you can handle the ups and downs before committing to Extreme X video poker online.
Pay Tables for Extreme X Video Poker
As we mentioned above, Extreme X video poker gives you the chance to choose between many different types of video poker pay tables. This versatility is helpful because it allows you to shape the style of play to the way you want it. You can stay conservative with Jacks or Better tables, be more aggressive with Bonus pay tables, or even add wild cards into play by using a Deuces Wild pay table.
Here are the different variations that you can choose while playing Extreme X video poker:
- Jacks or Better
- Bonus Poker
- Bonus Deluxe
- Double Bonus
- Double Double Bonus
- Triple Double Bonus
- Deuces Wild
- Deuces Wild Bonus
Below are a sample of some of the full pay tables available for these games on Extreme X video poker machines. By full pay, we mean that you won’t be able to find a pay table any more lucrative than this one at an Extreme X machine:
Jacks or Better Pay Table
| Coins/Hand | 1 Coin | 2 Coins | 3 Coins | 4 Coins | 5 Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Full house | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pairs | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Bonus Poker Pay Table
| Coins/Hand | 1 Coin | 2 Coins | 3 Coins | 4 Coins | 5 Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 200 | 400 | 600 | 800 | 4,000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind (aces) | 80 | 160 | 240 | 320 | 400 |
| Four of a kind (2s, 3s, or 4s) | 40 | 80 | 120 | 160 | 200 |
| Four of a kind (any other) | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Full house | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 |
| Flush | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pairs | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Double Double Bonus Poker Pay Table
| Coins/Hand | 1 Coin | 2 Coins | 3 Coins | 4 Coins | 5 Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four aces without any 2,3,4 | 400 | 800 | 1,200 | 1,600 | 2,000 |
| Four 2s, 3s, or 4s, without any A,2,3,4 | 160 | 320 | 460 | 640 | 800 |
| Four aces | 160 | 320 | 460 | 640 | 800 |
| Four 2s, 3s, or 4s | 80 | 160 | 240 | 320 | 400 |
| Four 5s through Ks | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Full house | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pairs | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Pair of jacks + | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Triple Double Bonus Pay Table
| Coins/Hand | 1 Coin | 2 Coins | 3 Coins | 4 Coins | 5 Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 200 | 400 | 600 | 800 | 4,000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind – aces 2, 3, 4 kicker | 800 | 1,600 | 2,400 | 3,200 | 4,000 |
| Four of a kind – 2s, 3s, or 4s – A,2,3,4 kicker | 400 | 800 | 1,200 | 1,600 | 2,000 |
| Four of a kind – aces 5s – Ks kicker | 160 | 320 | 460 | 640 | 800 |
| Four of a kind – 2s, 3s, or 4s 5s – Ks kicker | 80 | 160 | 240 | 320 | 400 |
| Four of a kind – any other | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Full house | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Two pairs | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Pair of jacks + | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Deuces Wild Pay Table
| Coins/Hand | 1 Coin | 2 Coins | 3 Coins | 4 Coins | 5 Coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| Four deuces | 200 | 400 | 600 | 800 | 1,000 |
| Wild royal rush | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Five of a kind | 16 | 32 | 48 | 64 | 80 |
| Straight flush | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 |
| Four of a kind | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Full house | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Flush | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Straight | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Three of a kind | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Keep in mind that these are the full-pay versions, and you might not be able to find them at the casino where you encounter Extreme X video poker. While the payback for these pay tables is generally beneficial to players, those payback totals will drop at the lesser pay tables. The bottom line is that you should try to locate the pay tables that give you the best payback percentage, which is why you should learn how to spot inferior tables.
Learning Strategy for Extreme X Video Poker
Extreme X video poker creates some interesting challenges for those who want to play the game with perfect strategy. After all, playing the game with perfect strategy means you can match the top payback percentages. If you make too many mistakes, your percentage will drop considerably.
In terms of most video poker games, strategy just entails learning the right holds and discards for every kind of deal that you might receive. There are two excellent ways to do this.
- Video Poker Trainer Software: Such software allows you to simulate video poker play as if you were playing for real in the casino. When you make a mistake about what you plan to hold and discard, choosing something that brings down the hand’s optimum value, the software will let you know and tell you the right choice. Using these trainers will ensure that you learn perfect play after a while.
- Strategy Charts: Strategy charts require memorization to be most effective. If you do, you can achieve perfect play. These charts rank the combinations of cards you might receive on the deal in terms of their expected value, allowing you to compare the combinations in your hand to it so that you know what you should keep and what you should dump.
Yet Extreme X video poker makes things a little trickier. First of all, there are many different pay tables from which you can choose. Learning the right plays for every one of them can be too burdensome.
That can be overcome by simply concentrating on one or two pay tables, then using one of the methods we talked about above. But that doesn’t account for the fever rounds and when to accept your multipliers. Because of that quirk in the game, it’s next to impossible for you to come up with a strategy that you’ll know is 100% correct.
We suggest that you don’t worry too much about this part of it. Concentrate on learning the holds and discards. As for the fever hands, try to use common sense, taking the multipliers when you can unless it is very early in the fever round and the hand is an extremely modest one.
Basically, you don’t want to get caught without using the multipliers, since that would negate the whole reason you paid the sixth coin. It’s better to use them early and run the risk that you might have scored a bigger payout later. The conservative play seems to be the wisest one when it comes to the Extreme X video poker twist.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Extreme X Video Poker
- Extra feature actually adds to payback
- Multipliers can really boost winnings in a hurry
- Many different pay tables to choose from
- Playing with extra feature can be expensive
- Strategy for when to use the multipliers is elusive
- Without the multipliers, bankroll will fall quickly
Conclusion on Extreme X Video Poker
Extreme X video poker, whether you find it in a casino or as part of a top gambling website, presents not just excitement but also a new twist on the decision-making process of video poker. Should you grab the multipliers when you can or hold out for the big score? No matter what you’re answer, you’re likely to enjoy this game.
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