Playing Sevens Wild Video Poker

Sevens Wild video poker represents a different spin on wild card video poker play, making it ideal for those who want a little more excitement. Most video poker games that incorporate wild cards into play do so by using twos in the deck or the joker. As you can tell from the name, this game puts sevens at the center of the action.

For many people, real money video poker is the only game they need to play at their casino of choice. It also makes for an excellent venue for online play, since the screen of a video poker machine can easily be simulated on computer, phone, or tablet screens. Gamblers can get the very best qualities of both table games and slot machines without any of the more troublesome parts.

But if there is one complaint about basic video poker, also known as Jacks or Better, it’s that it is too hard to achieve some of the higher-paying hands. Your chances of getting four of a kind, straight flush, or royal flush are pretty slim. You have to be content with grinding out your winnings if you are going to settle in for a session of video poker.

One way that you can overcome that problem is to play a video poker game with wild cards like Sevens Wild video poker. For those who are unaware, wild cards are designated cards that can be changed into whatever card in the deck best suits the hand. With wild cards, you can make those hands that otherwise seem unattainable much easier, and you can even create new winnings hands like five of a kind that aren’t available in Jacks or Better play.

In the case of Sevens Wild video poker, the four sevens in the deck are designated as wild. That gives you a one in four chance of receiving one of these cards whenever a card is scheduled to appear on your screen, either during the deal or the draw.

But you have to realize that no video poker game is going to give too much of an advantage to the player, lest the house edge completely be eradicated. As a result, pay tables for Sevens Wild video poker are adjusted so that the payoffs for some hands are discounted. Some hands that pay off in Jacks or Better don’t pay in Sevens Wild video poker because they are too simple to achieve. That means that the payback percentages for this brand of video poker actually trail the highest payoffs for the basic games.

In the following article, we will give you all the tools that you need to sit down and play a session of Sevens Wild video poker. First, we’ll explain how basic video poker works, then we’ll explain how gameplay changes once wild cards are added to the equation. Finally, we’ll talk about pay tables, payback percentages and strategy, all important concepts in the world of video poker.

Learning the Basics of Video Poker

Above, we told you that video poker is considered by many experts to be the most bettor-friendly game that you can find in a casino or at an online gambling site. How is it possible that this game can take all of the best elements of slot machines and table games without also taking in some of the weaknesses? Read on to find out.

Many people think about video poker in the same way as slot machines. That’s because they are often located in similar sections of the casino, where people can sit at a machine and play without having to deal with other patrons or employees. This separates it from table games, which often require gamblers to know not just the rules but also the protocol before they step up to play, or else they can be intimidated by the other people at the table.

But video poker, including Sevens wild video poker, leaves slot machines behind in a lot of different ways. First of all, when you play a slot machine, you have no way of affecting gameplay. You are sitting back and hoping that each spin is going to be a winner.

Another problem with slot machines is that you have no idea how much it is going to pay you back in an average session. You might be sitting at a machine with a 90% payback, a 95% payback, or even an 85% payback. The casino doesn’t need to tell you, and you have no way of finding out.

But video poker includes the concept of probability into its play. Because the 52 cards in a deck never change, your chances of creating hands that range from basic pairs or three of a kind all the way to the more lucrative four of a kind or royal flush never change. When you combine the probabilities with the pay tables that are provided to you, you know exactly what your payback is going to be for any machine that you choose.

Even if you don’t want to do all the math, you can easily look online to see how your machine and pay table will pay you back on average. And you’ll quickly realize that, on average, video poker pays back much more than slot machines. It even ranks right alongside the most competitive table games when you are talking about the highest-paying machines.

When you add that all up with the fact that video poker is extremely easy to learn, you can see why it makes for an easy choice for a newcomer at the casino. Meanwhile, expert gamblers can find a variety of video poker games available to them, each one presenting different challenges and opportunities. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at how to play basic video poker, which will then serve as the gateway to learning about Sevens Wild video poker.

Step 1: Your Bankroll

To win real money playing video poker, you have to put some money at stake and create a bankroll. If you are playing video poker online, you will have to create and fund an account at an online poker site.

When you put money into the machine, the money will show up in the form of credits instead of dollars and cents. Each credit will be equal to one unit of the denomination at the machine you have chosen.

Some video poker machines allow you to choose between several possible denominations. Most, however, will have the denomination already determined. It can range anywhere from a penny to a dollar. To figure out how many credits you’ll have, divide the amount of money that you put into the machine by the denomination; for example, $10 in a quarter machine will give you 40 credits (10 divided by .25).

Step 2: Your Bet

We talked above about how strategy will actually determine how much you win or lose at a machine in a given session. You might not realize that your strategy actually begins when you decide how much to bet on each hand. Betting incorrectly will actually lower your payback percentage.

Games like Sevens Wild video poker require you to bet anywhere between one and five credits per hand. Five credits is also known as the “max bet,” so when you see that button on the machine, you’ll know what that means. It is always recommended that you make the max bet on every hand that you play.

The reason for that comes down to the payoff that you’ll receive on the royal flush hand. The royal flush, when you’re betting just one through four credits, will pay out at odds of 250 to 1. But when you bet five credits, those odds jump up to 800 to 1.

You might think that you’ll never hit the royal flush but, if you’re a regular player, you eventually will. And when you do, your payback percentage will suffer if you hit it at less than the maximum wager. If you feel like you can’t afford the five-credit bet, you should try to find a less expensive denomination so you can keep your payback percentage as high as possible.

Step 3: Your Hand

For the sake of learning how to play the basics, we’ll first explain how to play a hand that doesn’t have wild cards in play as would be the case in Sevens Wild video poker. Once you make your wager, you will see five cards appear on your screen. These five cards will correspond to the cards that you might receive if getting dealt from a standard 52-card deck.

When you play five card draw poker, which is the closest table game equivalent to video poker, you are trying to make the best possible hand out of the five cards that you’ve been dealt and a subsequent draw round where you can discard certain cards and receive others from the deck. Sevens Wild video poker works the same way, only you aren’t trying to beat other players at a table, but instead trying to make a hand that is considered a winning one by the game’s pay table.

The hands that will earn you money when playing a game with wild cards like Sevens Wild video poker are a bit different than what you would expect when playing Jacks or Better. We will show these differences below when we get to the section on pay tables. For now, though, here are the hands that pay off on most video poker games:

• Pair of jacks of 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)

These hands range from very easy to make and low-paying (pair of jacks or better) to very difficult to make and high-paying (royal flush). When you first receive your deal, you will check to see if you have anything close to a winning combination. You might have one right off the bat, but even if you don’t, you still have a chance to win.

That chance comes on the draw. During the draw, you get to replace some or all of the cards in your hand with others from the 47 cards remaining in the deck (52 minus the 5 you received on the deal). This is where your strategy will come into play.

In any variation of poker, including Sevens Wild video poker, you have to make your choices about what to hold and what to discard based on probabilities of attaining winning hands. In addition to that, you’ll have to factor in the potential winnings attached to these hands, which makes it a kind of risk-reward judgment. Let’s take a look at a sample deal to see how this all works:

In this deal, you don’t have any winning combinations right off the bat. But you do have several combinations which are only a card or two away from being a winning hand. And you have to decide which of these possibilities you will to pursue.

If you keep the pair of fours, you will have the best chance of improving to a winning hand, and you may even improve to a lucrative winning hand like a full house or four of a kind with the right draw. You can also keep the three through six, meaning that you need to draw a two or a seven to make a straight. Finally, you can keep the suited three through five, which gives you an outside chance at the straight flush, which is the highest possible payoff for this hand.

What’s the right play? Well, when we get to Sevens Wild video poker strategy, you’ll learn how to figure that out. But for now, just know that you will press the buttons below the cards that you want to hold.

That will activate the draw and the machine will replace the cards you’ve discarded. If you make a winning hand, you will see your credits go up based on the winning amount. You won’t see your credits go down if you lose, because the amount that you bet will be deducted at the start of the hand.

That’s basically it in terms of playing a single hand of video poker. You can keep playing by repeating steps two and three as long as you have credits remaining in the machine. If you don’t, you’ll have to replenish your credits, or you can redeem the remaining credits you have if you want to quit.

Now that you know how to play basic video poker, we can now move on to playing Sevens Wild video poker. Wild cards are the key difference between Sevens Wild video poker and basic Jacks or Better. And, as you’ll see, the wild cards bring both advantages and disadvantages to your gameplay.

Playing With Wild Cards

As you can tell from the name of Sevens Wild video poker, the sevens in the 52-card deck are designated as “wild.” It means they can be changed into whatever card in the deck makes your hand the most lucrative.

Let’s take a look at a sample hand to see how it works. Imagine that you received the following cards on the deal:

As it is constituted, this deal wouldn’t seem to be too promising if you were playing Jacks or Better. You would have a pair of tens which you could try to improve. Or you could try to get lucky on the draw with the three clubs in hopes that you end up with a flush or the straight flush.

But since you’re playing Sevens Wild video poker, you have a wild card in the seven of spades. You just have to decide how to deploy it. Whenever you get a wild card on the deal, you will always be holding it. The key is deciding which way to use that wild card.

Look at the possibilities here. First of all, the wild card combined with the pair of tens gives you three of a kind. That is already a winning hand that will pay you back even money (as you’ll see when we get to pay tables), and it can be improved into four of a kind or even five of a kind.

Yes, that’s right, five of a kind. With wild cards, you have the chance to make that hand, which isn’t even a possibility if you were playing Jacks or Better. That’s one of the ways Sevens Wild video poker improves things for gamblers.

But there are other possibilities here as well. Imagine the seven acting as the jack of clubs. That gives you the nine, ten, jack, and queen of clubs. That leaves you one away from a flush or a straight but, even better, with the eight of clubs, king of clubs, or another wild card, you make a straight flush.

Doing the math, you have a 5 in 47 chance of that happening, since there are five outs in the deck to the straight flush and 47 cards remaining. Playing basic video poker, you would never have those kinds of odds of drawing to a straight flush. But that’s how it works in Sevens Wild video poker.

When you get the draw, the seven will automatically be changed into whatever card helps your hand the best. For example, let’s say that you kept the pair of tens and the wild card. Imagine that you receive the following draw:

Technically, you could consider this a full house, since you could make the sevens into a pair of whatever you want and combine that with the tens. But the most lucrative way that this can be constructed is to make the sevens into tens as well, giving you five of a kind. Luckily, the machine will automatically figure out what the wild cards should be to make the hand pay the most for you.

As you can see from that example, the wild card element of Sevens Wild video poker can really spice up gameplay. But as we look at the pay tables and payback percentages, you’ll see how this game adjusts the payback to keep things from getting too advantageous for you.

Pay Tables and Payback Percentages for Sevens Wild Video Poker

With Sevens Wild video poker, the paybacks are adjusted to account for easier paths to difficult hands. To explain this better, let’s take a look at the pay table for the game known as Jacks or Better. This is the full-pay version of the game, meaning that it’s the one that returns the most to gamblers:

Jacks or Better Pay Table

Now, let’s compare that to the full-pay version pay table of Sevens or Better video poker:

Sevens or Better Pay Table

When you compare the two, you’ll see how the payoffs for every hand for the straight flush on down to Three of a Kind are higher on the Jacks or Better game. That’s simply because it is much easier to make those hands playing with the wild cards.

You’ll also notice that the Sevens Wild video poker pay table does not pay off for either two pair or three of a kind. That means that the threshold for making a winning is a bit higher. The addition of separate paying hands for four of a kind with sevens, the wild royal flush, and five of a kind in the Sevens Wild table helps to compensate.

When you talk about video poker and payback, you should always be looking for a payback percentage of over 99% if at all possible. That’s because with payback that high, you can make up for the 1% or less by earning casino rewards for frequent play. As a result, you have a legitimate chance of making a profit if you play the game the right way for a long period of time.

In the case of the Sevens Wild video poker pay table listed above, the payback lands at roughly 99.1%. While that falls short of the Jacks or Better pay table (99.54%), it still makes it over the threshold we mentioned. And some might prefer it to Jacks or Better because it lends more of an opportunity for you to score quick, big payouts than Jacks or Better does.

What you do have to be careful about is the fact that Sevens Wild video poker sometimes comes attached with lesser pay tables. All of these pay tables will bring down your expected payback percentage on average, even though, in some cases, some hands pay more than they do in the full-pay version. You should be aware of what those pay tables look like, so here are a few Sevens Wild pay tables that you might encounter:

If you are only going to be playing Sevens Wild video poker for a short time, finding an ideal pay table won’t matter that much. Your payback will probably be determined by luck than anything else in that short span. But if you are going to try to play the game for a long while and be profitable at it, you need to know which pay tables return the most.

Video Poker Strategy for Sevens Wild

Playing Sevens Wild video poker with perfect strategy is the only way that you can reach the maximum payback percentage as listed. And that can only happen if every decision that you make to hold and discard brings the highest expected value to the deal. If you were to play the hand an infinite amount of times, you would return the most money with that single deal.

All of that is based on the probabilities and pay tables. But that is a lot of math for any person to handle in one sitting. You would need a calculator and probability tables with you at all times to play the game in an ideal fashion, which isn’t very feasible.

Luckily, there are plenty of video poker enthusiasts who have done all the work for you in terms of the math. And they have come up with two excellent methods you can learn perfect strategy for Sevens Wild video poker or any other video poker game.

• Strategy Charts: Strategy charts list all of the combinations of cards you might receive on a deal and ranks those combinations in terms of their expected value. You can compare the cards in your hand, look for the combination that you have that is ranked highest on the list, and discard the cards that aren’t included. To use a strategy chart properly, you’ll have to memorize them, which, although it might take some time, is worth it.
• Video Poker Trainers: Video poker trainers refer to the software that you can purchase to allow you to simulate gameplay. The software can be customized to the type of pay table you’re using and to wild card play as well, making it perfect for Sevens Wild video poker. With a video poker trainer, you can learn from any mistakes that you make so that you don’t repeat them when you are playing for actual money.

Conclusion on Sevens Wild Video Poker

If you’re tired of dealing with deuces or jokers as wild cards all the time, Sevens Wild video poker can be an excellent alternative whether you play it at a regular casino or experience it at one of the top gambling websites on the internet. It will bring you all the excitement of traditional wild card play with a little bit of a different angle. But you just have to realize that all of the drawbacks, such as the adjusted pay tables and the higher threshold for winning hands, come with it as well.