Multi-Strike Video Poker
For video poker players who feel like there should be an advantage to getting on a long hot streak, Multi-Strike video poker is just the game for them. The longer you keep your streak alive, the more you benefit from multipliers along the way. Win four hands in a row and the winnings will skyrocket, especially if some of those winning hands are high-paying ones.
Playing video poker in its most basic form is fine for some people. They can play Jacks or Better for hours upon end, content to grind away at a baseline level without extensive winnings along the way. But many crave more excitement and the possibility of big winnings in a short period of time.
Video poker manufacturers responded to that desire by creating games that catered to those thrill seekers. First, they adjusted the pay tables to make them top-heavier and more likely to create huge payoffs. Then, they added wild card games like Deuces Wild to give players more chances at rare hands like the straight flush or even the royal flush.
Perhaps what’s most exciting has been the development of umbrella video poker games that let players choose their pay table and version of play, then add a twist to the action. Multi-Strike video poker is just one of these umbrella games. At its most basic level, you can play as if you were playing Jacks or Better, Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild, or any other popular form of video poker.
By increasing your wager, however, you can increase the action by activating the possibility of four video poker lines. If you win at one level, you move up to the next, and that process continues as long as you keep winning and make it all the way to the fourth and top level. Along the way, multipliers increase to boost your winnings as you go.
By the time you reach the top level of Multi-Strike video poker, any winnings will be multiplied by eight. If you’ve reached that level, that means that you’ve already enjoyed multipliers of 2x and 4x along the way. Win at all four lines, and you’ll have earned an impressive profit, far more than if you had won four hands in a row playing basic video poker.
In the following article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about Multi-Strike video poker. We’ll explain basic video poker play and, then, show you how to play with the multiple lines afforded by the Multi-Strike twist. We’ll also talk about the different pay tables available, how payback percentages are affected by the game, and the best ways to develop a great strategy for the game.
Learning Basic Video Poker
To play Multi-Strike video poker, you first have to learn the basics of real money video poker. Luckily, that’s not too hard a process at all, especially if you know a little bit about poker hands. Even if you don’t, it likely won’t take you more than a few minutes to learn how to play.
Video poker is basically a computerized simulation of five card draw poker, a game that many people play at home. In five card draw, you are dealt five cards and have a chance to improve those cards via a draw round where you can discard certain cards and have them replaced by others from the deck. Video poker is the same except you’re not trying to beat other players at the table. You’re trying to make a hand that the machine considers a paying one.
You might be able to tell that video poker owes a lot to the probabilities of poker hands. And that makes it a game that’s far more preferable to slot machines where there are no probabilities and outcomes are completely random. Plus, video poker allows you to somewhat control gameplay by making decisions that will affect winning or losing.
What video poker has in common with slot machines, that is a positive for many people, is the solitary play. When you play video poker, it’s just you and the machine or, if you’re playing online, you and your device. There’s no need to rely on the actions of others at all, which can be a relief in a pressure-packed casino environment.
On top of that, video poker pays the player back as well as some of the highest-paying table games, and easily outdoes the payback of slot machines. Video poker is perhaps the most gambler-friendly game in the casino when you add it all up. That’s why, if you haven’t already, you should learn how to play.
To that end, here is an easy, step-by-step look at the process of playing video poker. It will form your basis for Multi-Strike video poker when you step up to play that game.
Step 1: Building Your Bankroll
You can insert cash or a redemption ticket to start playing video poker on a machine in the casino. There is a slot for just that purpose easily identifiable on the machine. If you decide to play online, you can create your bankroll by signing up for an account with the website offering the game.
Your bankroll will be determined by the amount of money you put into the machine and the denomination of the machine. Many machines allow you to choose the denomination, while others come with a set denomination. In any case, the denomination at which you play will be equal to one credit or coin in the machine.
For example, imagine that you put $10 into a machine with a denomination of a quarter. When you divide 10 by .25, you come up with 40 credits. That will be your bankroll to start play.
Your bankroll should be a reflection of how long you want to play the game and the size of the bets you need to make.
Remember that, once you learn how to play video poker, you will be able to play several hands per minute. That means that you might blow through a bankroll quickly unless you put in a sizable amount or are lucky enough to win a bunch of early hands.
Step 2: Making Your Bet
For now, we will just concern ourselves with basic video poker betting. When we get into the gameplay for Multi-Strike video poker, we’ll talk about how your betting options will change. In terms of basic video poker, you’ll have the option of betting between one and five coins per hand.
When given that choice, it is always preferable that you play the maximum amount of five coins. The reason for that comes down to the royal flush hand, which is the rarest and most lucrative hand in video poker. If you play five coins, you will get paid for making a royal flush at 800 to 1.
But when you play one through four coins, you will only receive 250 to 1 on a royal flush. If you find that the game is too expensive for you when betting five coins per hand, you should consider switching to a game with a lower denomination. In terms of the mechanics of the machine, you can toggle up and down one coin at a time before pressing the “Deal” button when you come to the desired amount, or simply press the “Max Bet” button to play five coins and trigger the deal.
Step 3: Playing Your Hand
Once you activate the deal, you will see five cards appear on your hand. The goal is for you to come up with a hand that pays according to the pay table you’re using. Although they sometimes change depending on the pay table in question, these are the basic winning hands in video poker:
- Pair of jacks or better
- Two pair
- Three of a kind
- Straight (five cards of consecutive rank)
- Flush (five cards of same suit)
- Full house (three of a kind and a pair in same hand)
- Four of a kind
- Straight flush (five cards of consecutive rank and same suit)
- Royal flush (ten, jack, queen, king, and ace of same suit)
You don’t need to panic if your initial deal doesn’t include any winning hands. You can still win the hand even if the first five cards don’t have any seeds of winning hands. That’s because, like five card draw, you’ll have an opportunity to discard the cards that you don’t believe are helpful to you and have them replaced by other cards from the deck that dealt you the first five.
If you have a winning hand with which you’re satisfied on the deal, you can hold all five cards and simply take your winnings. However, if you think your hand can be improved, you’ll have to make your decision about which cards you want to hold and which you want to discard. This can be a difficult choice as you try to weigh your chances of making various hands against the potential winnings from those hands.
Let’s take a look at a sample deal that you might encounter:
On the one hand, you have a pair of jacks, which gives you a winning hand right off the bat. Although it only pays a small amount, you can easily improve it if you drop the other three cards in the deal. You might even get a high-paying hand like a full house or even four of a kind.
Your other main option is to keep all but one of the jacks. If you do that, you’ll give yourself a chance at a possible straight if you can draw a ten to complete it. It would pay higher than the pair of jacks if you can get it, but you would have barely higher than a one in 12 chance of drawing one of the tens in the deck to do it.
As you can see, these choices can get tricky, especially if you haven’t played video poker before. An experienced player, however, will be able to assess that immediately and realize that holding the jacks is the right play. We’ll talk more about how to learn the right choice when we get to the strategy section below.
Once you have made the decision about how you are going to move forward with the hand, you need to press the “Hold” buttons underneath all the cards, if any, you wish to hold. Then you can hit the “Draw” button and see how your hand plays out. Your hand is complete at this point, and the machine will add credits to your account for anything that you’ve won.
One note about the cards you can expect: Each hand and each draw is a brand new entity where your chances of receiving any single card are exactly the same. You’ll have a one in 52 chance of getting a specific card on the deal, and a one in 47 chance of receiving one on the draw. A random number generator inside the machine’s software ensures that.
Many gamblers play under the misconception that certain cards are “due” to appear if they haven’t shown up in a while, but that isn’t the case. Your probabilities are always the same and you shouldn’t deviate from your strategy just because you are guessing a certain card will show up.
Step 4: Wrapping It up or Continuing
If you have credits still in the machine, you can play as many hands of video poker as you wish by repeating steps two and three. Or you can get a redemption ticket by pressing the “Cash Out” button at any time to take your remaining credits away from the machine. Once you run out of credits, you’ll have to put in more money to continue playing.
That should help you learn the basics of video poker. Once you have that down pat, you’ll be ready to take on Multi-Strike video poker.
Multi-Strike Video Poker Gameplay
The first thing you need to know about Multi-Strike video poker is that you’ll need to bet for each line that you wish to play. You can activate one, two, three, or four lines at once, but you need to bet to get each one in play. For example, if you wanted to play with the max bet, you would need:
- 1 line = 5 coins
- 2 lines = 10 coins
- 3 lines = 15 coins
- 4 lines = 20 coins
The more lines that you play, the higher the multipliers that are available to you. How do multipliers work in Multi-Strike video poker? Well, whatever the multiplier might be, you would multiply your winnings by that amount should you win the hand.
For example, let’s imagine that you are playing a Jacks or Better game with a max bet within Multi-Strike video poker and manage a full house on a line with a 4x multiplier. The normal payout for a full house with five coins is 45 coins, but it would be multiplied by 4 for a payout of 180 coins.
When playing Multi-Strike video poker, your best chance for maximizing your winnings is to play all four lines and make a 20-coin bet. This gives you the chance at the biggest multipliers. And the way to get those multipliers is to keep winning.
Each hand of Multi-Strike video poker starts out at the bottom line. There is no multiplier on the bottom hand, so this hand will play out normally with the deal and the draw. The two ways you can move on to the second line is to either win the hand or get a “Free Ride” card on the deal.
The “Free Ride” card is just an indication that the player can move on to the next level even if they don’t win the hand. It will show up on the screen for a moment and then be replaced by an actual card so that you can play the hand as normal. You will only get a “Free Ride” card on the deal and not the draw.
Once you move on to the second line, there will be a 2x multiplier applied to the hand. You would then move on to the third line if you can win the second hand or get a “Free Ride” card. The third line has a 4x multiplier in place.
The third line is played in the same way, with the possibility of moving up to the fourth and final line if you can get a winning hand or a “Free Ride” card. At the top line, the multiplier becomes 8x. This is as high as you can go, meaning that at the completion of that hand, you will start over at the bottom line.
In addition, if at any point you have a losing hand and don’t get a “Free Ride” card, you will return to the bottom line. It is important to understand that, even if you bet the 20 coins, you don’t necessarily get to play all four lines. You might lose the bottom hand and won’t even get to play more than a single hand for that amount.
That makes Multi-Strike video poker a bit of a daunting proposition for those who might not like expensive video poker games. There is no guarantee that you’ll get any help from the multipliers. And your bankroll will suffer in a hurry if that doesn’t happen.
Let’s take a look at the other side of the coin. What happens if you get a hot streak when playing Multi-Strike video poker?
Let’s look at an example, again with the max bet on a Jacks or Better pay table, where you win four hands in a row. For our example, let’s imagine two pair on the first hand, a full house on the second hand, a flush on the third hand, and three of a kind on the fourth hand. Here is what the payouts would look like:
- Hand 1: 10 coins times 1 = 10 coins
- Hand 2: 45 coins times 2 = 90 coins
- Hand 3: 30 coins times 4 = 120 coins
- Hand 4: 15 coins times 8 = 120 coins
Add that all up and you received 340 coins for your winning streak. That’s a 320-coin profit when you subtract your initial 20-coin bet. You basically scored at 17 to 1.
That is the kind of action that makes Multi-Strike video poker such a thrill ride for a gambler. With each new line, that excitement rises a little bit more. And the winnings go up in exponential fashion.
Of course, you don’t need to make it all the way up the ladder to get benefits from the extra feature of Multi-Strike video poker. You can grab a nice profit even if you can get to the 2x or 4x lines. As we stated above, your best chance of maximizing your winnings is to bet 20 coins every single time, since that gives you your highest payback percentage, regardless of which pay table you choose to utilize.
Choosing Your Pay Table
Multi-Strike video poker is the kind of video poker game that gives you access to many different types of video poker. You simply choose the pay table and decide on how many lines you want to play, giving you access to the multipliers. Here are the games available to you:
- Jacks or Better
- Bonus Poker
- Bonus Deluxe
- Double Bonus
- Super Double Bonus
- Double Double Bonus
- Super Double Double Bonus
- Triple Double Bonus
- Super Aces
- White Hot Aces
- Deuces Wild
- Deuces Wild Bonus
- Deuces Wild Double Bonus
- Joker Poker
Each of these games put emphasis on winning hands in a different way. Deuces Wild and Joker Poker allow you the chance to play with wild cards. You can check out our main video poker page to see the ins and outs of all of these different games.
Here is a sampling of a few of the pay tables that you can play on a Multi-Strike video poker 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 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
| 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 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 |
| 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 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 | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 | 50 |
| 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 |
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 flush | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Five of a kind | 15 | 30 | 45 | 60 | 75 |
| Straight flush | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Four of a kind | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 |
| Full house | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Flush | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Straight | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Three of a kind | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
You can also check out the payback percentages for these games by checking out the main pages for each game. The pay tables listed above are all full-pay, which means that you might encounter certain tables within Multi-Strike video poker that will pay you a little less.
In terms of the extra feature, it generally raises the payback percentage between .2% and .6%, depending on the pay table. That might not seem like a lot, but it will make a difference if you plan to make Multi-Strike video poker your regular game at your favorite in-person or online casino.
The trade-off is that the cost of activating the extra feature makes Multi-Strike video poker much more volatile when the multipliers are in play. You might have to adjust your bankroll expectations to account for this. Otherwise, the risk of losing your bankroll increases significantly when you make the extra bets.
Strategy for Multi-Strike Video Poker
With most extra-feature video poker games, you don’t need to adjust your strategy. You just need to pick one or two of the games within the umbrella and learn how to play those games in expert fashion. But Multi-Strike video poker throws a wrench in those plans, and the rising multipliers are the reason for that.
Because you need a winning hand to take advantage of the multipliers and rise up higher on the ladder, you need to adjust your strategy. You have to think about playing more conservatively than you otherwise would. Normally, your strategy of what to hold and what to discard should give you the highest expected value for each hand, but that might have to be altered to climb to the higher multipliers.
How do you learn those strategy changes? Well, the two main methods are strategy charts and video poker training software. But you have to find one of these two methods that can be adjusted based on the Multi-Strike video poker twist.
If you can do that, here is how those two resources for video poker players work:
- Video Poker Training Software: This software allows you to simulate video poker play as if you were in the casino. You can play with a bankroll and see what the correct holds are for each possible deal you might receive. Playing with a trainer will eventually lead to a point where you can make every decision correctly.
- Strategy Charts: You can find these online for most of the games listed above and, since Multi-Strike video poker is becoming so popular, you can find them for games with the rising multipliers twist as well. Memorizing these charts will help you learn the correct hold and discard for whatever deal you might receive.
Pros and Cons of Multi-Strike Video Poker
- Chance for exponential spike in winnings when you win multiple hands in a row
- Extra feature actually adds to the payback percentage
- Access to many different types of pay table
- Very expensive game to play with the extra feature
- No guarantee that the multipliers will help even with the extra bet
- Strategy must be adjusted from what would normally be the case for each pay table
Conclusion on Multi-Strike Video Poker
Multi-Strike video poker, which has become extremely popular in both casinos and as a part of top gambling websites, allows you to ride the wave of excitement with each successive winning hand. Winning streaks don’t come around often in video poker, but when they do in this game, your bankroll will really soar. If those winning streaks are really rare during your gameplay, you could find yourself striking out.
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