How to Play Flip and Pay Poker Video Poker
Flip and Pay Poker video poker is just the right kind of game for video poker players who like to wonder “what if” when playing regular versions of the game. As in, “What if I could just change that one card a little bit to make the best hand?” Well, with Flip and Pay Poker, you can.
Flip and Pay Poker video poker is one of the video poker variations which adds a slight twist on gameplay to spice things up. That makes it the kind of game for people who get a little tired of the usual rhythm of the deal and draw that you get when playing Jacks or Better or other basic video poker games in casinos or at online gambling websites.
The big twist can only be earned if you essentially double the bet that you would normally make. You don’t have to do this and can play the game as if you were playing Jacks or Better or other Bonus poker games that are included in Flip and Pay Poker video poker. But if you make that extra wager, it opens up the possibility of your changing a card to help your hand out.
Basically, the card that is changed is whatever one, if there is any in the hand, that can improve the hand by moving up one or down one in rank. In other words, a 2 might become a 3, or a king might become a queen. Certain conditions are attached to these changes, but that is the basic idea behind it.
Imagine if you were just one rank away from hands like three of a kind, a full house, or even a royal flush.
The Flip and Pay Poker video poker twist can immediately put you in range of hands like that, certainly more so than if you were playing normal versions of video poker. And the pay table is also boosted for several hands when you make the extra wager.
Of course, there is no guarantee that you will have any cards that can be “flipped” to help out your hand. And the flip can only take place on the deal, meaning that the draw happens as it always does in video poker. When you consider the extra bets that you have to make to enjoy the special feature, Flip and Pay Poker video poker can be a really expensive game if those flips don’t come along to help you out early in your session.
The following article will tell you everything there is to know about Flip and Pay Poker video poker. You’ll find out how the game’s unique feature works and what it means for your chances of making money playing the game. And we’ll also talk about pay tables, strategies for playing the game, and its advantages and drawbacks when you compare it to other video poker games.
How to Play Basic Video Poker
If you’ve never played video poker in any form until now, you’ve been missing out on one of the best ways to gamble. Not only can you play video poker in relative solitude as if it were a slot machine, but you can also use strategy to win as if you were playing a table game. On top of that, payoffs rank up with just about any other form of casino game you might want to play.
On top of that, it’s extremely easy to learn how to play. In its most basic form, video poker acts as a digital simulation of Five-Card Draw Poker, a common card game. The big difference is that you only need to form a winning hand as set by the game’s pay table instead of needing to beat several different players with your hand.
Flip and Pay Poker video poker adds a twist to the most basic forms of video poker that we’ll explain in-depth in just a bit. But first, you need to have a solid foundation of video poker and how to play the game when you walk into a casino or visit a gambling website. Here is a basic step-by-step tutorial:
- Insert Your Money: There is a slot for cash or a redemption ticket on most video poker machines. Online games require you to create an account and fund that account in most cases before you can begin playing. Your money will be broken down into coins or credits, with each coin being equal to one unit of the denomination of the game you’re playing.
- Making Your Bet: This is one area where Flip and Pay Poker video poker is a bit more complicated than your average video poker game. In most video poker games, you have the chance to bet between one and five coins. You can do that in Flip and Pay Poker as well, but you also have the opportunity of matching your original bet so that you can activate the game’s special feature.
- Receiving the Deal: You will receive cards, with your odds of receiving each specific card the same as if you were playing with a 52-card deck. The idea is to make up a hand that qualifies as a winning hand according to the pay table of the specific game that you’re playing. At the very least, the hope is that you have something in your initial hand that could be transformed into a winning hand.
- Deciding the Draw: You have one opportunity to improve your hand in the draw round. This is when you decide which cards aren’t helping your hand and which you’d like to hold onto going forward. After hitting the “Hold” button beneath the cards that you wish to keep, the machine will hand out cards from the same deck that dealt you to replace the cards that you’ve discarded.
- Scoring the Hand: The machine will then determine whether your hand met the qualifications as a winning hand and pass out credits accordingly. Losing hands will have already had the bet deducted before the deal, so there is no need to take any more away.
- Playing Again: As long as you have some credits remaining on the machine or in your account, you can continue playing. Or you can cash out at any time and collect your redemption ticket. If you run out of credits, you will have to replenish them to continue playing.
It’s a pretty simple process, one that you should be able to learn quickly if you are brand new to the game.
But remember that Flip and Pay Poker video poker brings an interesting feature if you choose to activate it.
Let’s see how all that works.
The Flip and Pay Twist
It’s important to note that Flip and Pay Poker can be played normally. The pay tables would resemble exactly what you would expect to see from games like Jacks or Better or Double Double Bonus. That is entirely your choice when you begin to play at the machine.
The only way to activate the Flip and Pay option is to bet twice what you normally would. For example, if you wanted to get paid on the Flip and Pay pay table for one credit, you would have to bet two. A max bet payoff would require you to bet ten coins instead of five.
As you might imagine, these bets can get quite expensive in a hurry, especially when you’re only getting paid out for essentially half of that bet. But Flip and Pay Poker compensates you by allowing one card to be changed under certain circumstances. And that card can either move up one or down in rank.
To understand rank, think about it as the numerical value of a card. That might not make sense when it comes to face cards, which aren’t technically represented by a number. But they are ranked in the following order:
- Ace
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Jack
- Queen
- King
- Ace
As you can see, the ace can be used as either a low or high card in video poker. When you flip an ace in Flip and Pay Poker video poker, you can flip it in either direction. It can be turned into a king or a two, depending on what your hand requires the most.
The other thing you have to understand about the flip is that the suit of the card being flipped cannot change. In other words, you can’t turn the king of hearts into the ace of spades if that’s the card you need for a flush or a royal flush. Only the rank changes.
One other factor you should note about the flipping aspect is that you really don’t have to do any deciding. The software inside the machine will automatically flip the card to help you out, and all you have to decide is whether or not to accept the flip.
You always should because it will always improve your hand. Let’s take a look at how this might play out. Imagine that you received the following deal:
The machine, or your online casino site, will recognize immediately that the jack of spades can be flipped to the queen of spades to improve your hand to two pair. You could then keep the two pair, discard the ace of clubs, and go for the full house on the draw.
Here is another example:
In this case, the five of diamonds will become the six of diamonds. With the help of the flip, you end up with a straight. Again, by paying more into the initial wager, you give yourself a chance at winning a hand that you otherwise wouldn’t have won.
There are a couple restrictions on the ways that a card can flip. First of all, only if the flip makes a hand that is of a value equal to or greater two pair will it take place. In other words, you won’t get a flip to a single pair, and you won’t get a flip that simply gives you a better card for the draw.
Also, the flip won’t take place to improve the hand if it has to become a card that is already in play. Consider the following two hands:
In the first hand, you can’t flip the four into a five because it would become the five of hearts, which is already in your hand. The second hand, however, would indeed be flipped into two pair because the five of hearts is not included in your original hand.
You also must realize that there might be cases where a few cards can be flipped. In this case, the machine will realize which of the cards will give the hand the highest value going forward on the draw.
When a card is flipped, the card that it originally was goes back into the deck. That means you could conceivably draw it when you go to replace the cards that have been discarded. In other words, you would still be drawing from 47 remaining cards as is always the case in video poker.
In addition, you have to realize that the flip in Flip and Pay Poker video poker only occurs on the deal. You will know about the flip going into the draw so that you can make your decisions based on that. But once the draw occurs, there will be no flip, not even if another card comes out on the draw that might meet the previous requirements.
Finally, you do have the chance to deny the flip and go back to your original card. But this is bad strategy in every instance because the flip always improves your hand. If you “unflip,” you are hurting your chances significantly.
As you can see from those examples, Flip and Pay Poker video poker makes for some exciting surprises. When you consider that the game is in multiple play mode, you can benefit from a flip over several hands, as we will explain.
Explaining Multiple Pay Mode
One of the ways that the activated flip feature in Flip and Pay Poker video poker really pays off is because the game must be played in multiple play mode. That basically allows the gambler to play several hands of video poker on a single deal.
Flip and Pay Poker video poker comes in three-, five-, or ten-play mode. Those are the numbers of hands that you can play at a time. But you have to make bets for all of those hands.
When you consider that the game already requires you to bet extra just to activate the flip option, you are talking about a very expensive proposition. For the max bet and Flip and Pay mode, you would have to bet ten coins per hand. That makes 30 coins for three hands, 50 for five, and 100 for ten.
But if you can take advantage of a flipped hand, you can benefit from it multiple times. Let’s say that you receive the following deal in triple-play mode:
If you bet the ten coins per hand, you would have activated the flip. And it would come into play here because the eight of spades would change over into the seven of spades, giving you three of a kind. That deal would then be played out in three separate hands.
Think about it. You would already have the three of a kind in hand, so you would be paid for the winning hand in all three. You could also conceivably improve upon that in the remaining hands, perhaps getting a full house or four of a kind. Now imagine if you had that in five-play or ten-play mode, and you can see how the winnings add up fast.
Of course, you can also lose rather quickly if you get several hands where the flip doesn’t come into play or where you simply have a losing hand.
Flip and Pay Poker video poker is a game that requires an extensive bankroll if you wish to play for a long time. And it’s extremely volatile in the sense that it can encompass wild swings between winning and losing.
It’s not a game for casual players unless they don’t mind the significant risk of losing all of their bankroll quickly. You might be willing to make that tradeoff in return for the chance at many winning hands out of a single deal. Or, if you’re a serious video poker enthusiast, you have to be prepared to beef up your bankroll for Flip and Pay Poker video poker.
Pay Tables and Payback Percentages for Flip and Pay Poker Video Poker
As we mentioned earlier, Flip and Pay Poker video poker allows you to choose from several different types of video poker with or without the flip option. But one of the ways that the flip can help you is by beefing up the pay tables for those games. It helps to make up for the expensive bets on multiple hands.
A pay table shows you how much you can expect to win for each hand that you make. It also takes into account how much you will be betting. By looking at the pay tables, you can judge how much money the game will pay you back on average, a number also known as the payback percentage.
For the sake of this article, we’re only going to be talking about the pay tables with the “Flip” features activated. If you want to see what the tables look like for the games without the special feature, you can go to the individual game sections to find out what those pay tables might be.
For now, let’s take a look at the pay tables for the various games you can play in Flip and Pay Poker video poker, specifically with the flip option in play. These are the full-pay versions of these games, meaning that you are getting the most return out of all those possible pay tables you might encounter, either at land-based casinos or at online gambling sites.
Jacks or Better Pay Table
| Coins/Hands | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1000 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Full house | 13 | 26 | 39 | 52 | 65 |
| Flush | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 |
| Straight | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pair | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Bonus Poker Pay Table
| Coins/Hands | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 200 | 400 | 600 | 800 | 4000 |
| 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 | 12 | 24 | 36 | 48 | 60 |
| Flush | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Straight | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pair | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Bonus Poker Deluxe Pay Table
| Coins/Hands | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1000 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 80 | 160 | 240 | 320 | 400 |
| Full house | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 |
| Straight | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pair | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Double Double Bonus Pay Table
| Coins/Hands | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1000 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind aces w/ any 2,3,4 | 400 | 800 | 1200 | 1600 | 2000 |
| Four of a kind 2s, 3s, or 4s w/ any A,2,3,4 | 160 | 320 | 480 | 640 | 800 |
| Four aces | 160 | 320 | 480 | 640 | 800 |
| Four 2s, 3s, 4s | 80 | 160 | 240 | 320 | 400 |
| Four 5s through Ks | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Full house | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 |
| Flush | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two pair | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Pair of jacks + | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Triple Double Bonus Pay Table
| Coins/Hands | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1000 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a kind – aces 2, 3, or 4 kicker | 800 | 1600 | 2400 | 3200 | 4000 |
| Four of a kind – 2s, 3s, or 4s A, 2, 3, or 4 kicker | 400 | 800 | 1200 | 1600 | 2000 |
| Four of a kind – aces 5s – Ks kicker | 160 | 320 | 480 | 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 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 |
| Flush | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Two pair | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Pair of jacks + | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
In most of these pay tables, the differences you’ll see in the pay tables come in the way the full house, flush, and straight hands pay out. They are generally made more lucrative in the “Flip” versions of Flip and Pay Poker video poker. As we said, that helps to make up for how much you have to bet.
But it doesn’t quite make up for all of it. Here are the payback percentages for each of these pay tables. Payback percentages, for those who are new to video poker, are an average estimation on how much a player will return from a machine if they play it for a long time, with 100% being the break-even amount.
- Jacks or Better: 97.7%
- Bonus Poker: 98.2%
- Bonus Poker Deluxe: 98.6%
- Double Double Bonus: 98.3%
- Triple Double Bonus: 98.0%
Unfortunately, all of those payback percentages come up short of the full-pay versions of those games without any Flip and Pay option enabled.
That doesn’t mean that they should be completely avoided. Thrill seekers who want to go for big payouts in a short period of time can definitely get that accomplished much more easily by having the flip around.
But if you really want to play the game for a long time and come out with a profit, Flip and Pay Poker video poker is not really recommended. Simply put, you should stick with games that have payback percentages over 99% for that purpose. With games like that, even if you are losing slightly, you can make up for that with the rewards you get from your casino or gambling website.
Developing Strategy for Flip and Pay Poker Video Poker
Strategy is an important part of any video poker scenario. The good news with Flip and Pay Poker video poker is that you don’t really have to learn any new strategy. As we said earlier, other than knowing that you always keep the flipped card, there is nothing new to learn in that respect.
As for the individual variations that can be played, such as Jacks or Better or Double Double Bonus or all the ones listed above, you can visit their separate pages to find tips on strategy. You can also use one of the following two methods:
- Strategy Charts: These can be found online for all of the major video poker games, and they are essentially lists of all of the card combinations you might receive in a hand. On the chart, these combinations are ranked from the best to the worst in terms of the value of the hand. You can then compare your own hand to what is on the list, find the highest-ranked combination that you have, and discard whatever cards aren’t essential to that.
- Video Poker Training Software: Training software allows you to play video poker in simulated fashion and get tips on what holds and discards you should be making. The best of these software applications can be customized to match the most popular video poker games. By playing over and over and getting the right tips, you can eventually start to play the game at an expert level.
The reason it’s important to play with expert strategy is that it greatly improves your own expected payback percentage. As you make more and more mistakes during gameplay, you could find yourself losing more than you should.
You might get lucky occasionally on the draw, but eventually, the best way to ensure that you maximize your winning is to make the right decisions about what to hold and discard.
Flip and Pay Poker Video Poker Conclusion
Flip and Pay Poker video poker is certainly an exciting video poker version, something that can bring you big winnings in a hurry playing in a casino or at a top gambling website. You’ll be watching for flips to make your hands massive. Just be sure to bring enough of a bankroll to withstand those stretches when there aren’t enough flips to stay afloat.
Recognize Us? We've been found on:
