Shockwave Video Poker

Shockwave video poker is the perfect brand of video poker for players who love to go fishing for four of a kind hands. Those that do are rewarded in this game with a so-called “Shockwave” round of hands where the payback for a four of a kind hand soars into the stratosphere. It’s a game that can be hard on you if you can’t manage the quads, but it does present the chance for massive payouts if you do.

In the world of video poker, there are essentially two types of games. There are games that are variations of the most common form of the game known as video poker known as Jacks or Better. These games basically take the card game known as five card draw poker and translate it into digital form for video poker machines and top gambling websites.

Jacks or Better video poker is an excellent game for bettors, one that is easy to learn, incorporates strategy, and allows for competitive payback. The only problem is that it is extremely difficult to score a major payoff in one single stroke. To do that, you really need to hit the royal flush, which is the rarest hand in the game and also the highest-paying by a large margin.

But other types of video poker games have emerged in the wake of Jacks or Better that have made an effort to give players more chances at quick, significant payouts. Shockwave video poker certainly falls into this second category. In particular, it allows players the chance to build on a four of a kind hand into a potentially big payout.

When playing Shockwave video poker, you follow the basic process that you would as if you were playing Jacks or Better, so that means it isn’t hard to play. For the most part, you will be dealing with a single pay table that resembles that of Jacks or Better, albeit one that pays more aggressively for full house and flush hands and not as well for two pair. The changes take place when you manage a four of a kind hand.

Once a four of a kind hand is hit, the next 10 hands, or until another four of a kind is hit (whichever comes up first) are played with a special pay table. On this pay table, the four of a kind pays off at a stunning 800 to 1. That is the same payout that the royal flush receives with the maximum wager of five coins.

What that means is that four of a kinds are highly coveted when playing Shockwave video poker. But it also means that you could be dealing with a serious struggle to keep your bankroll afloat if you can’t grab those quads with consistency. That is a tradeoff that you have to make in order to have a chance at the big payout.

In the following article, we’ll explain all you need to know about Shockwave video poker. We’ll show you how to play, how the special pay table works, and what you can expect in terms of payback percentage. Finally, we’ll go over how you can learn the strategy that puts you in the best position to earn the most money while playing this exciting game.

Learning Video Poker Gameplay

As we said above, Shockwave video poker is a basic twist on the common video poker game known as Jacks or Better, which is called that because the most common hand that will return you payment is a pair of jacks, queens, kings, or aces. Some of these variations require you to learn different skills and modes of gameplay. But all Shockwave video poker requires is perhaps a slight strategy adjustment. Basic gameplay is the same as if you were playing Jacks or Better.

What you’ll discover, if you are new to video poker, is that it is a game that really caters to gamblers of all skills. Beginning players will love that it extremely simple to learn and allows you to play without any kind of interruption from other gamblers or casino employees. It’s just you versus the machine. Experienced gamblers will love that it incorporates strategy and that the payback for the top video poker machines ranks among the best of all casino games.

Many people who don’t know any better lump video poker in with slot games. It’s true that both slot machines and video poker both allow for self-contained play. But the similarities really end there.

For one thing, slot machines don’t allow the gambler to have any impact over winning and losing. There is also no way for you to know, when playing slot machines, how often winning spins might show up. That is the hands of the casino and the machine manufacturer, and it basically leaves you guessing about what your average return for investment might be.

On the other hand, video poker can’t hide any of that information. Since you are dealing with a simulated deck of 52 cards, mathematical probability will determine your chances of making winning hands. Since the pay tables show how these hands pay, you can then calculate your payback percentage for any machine that you’re playing, including Shockwave video poker.

Then, there is the strategic element. When playing video poker, you have the chance to decide which cards you want to hold from your original deal and which you want to discard, all in an effort to exert some control over gameplay. For players who don’t like the idea of gambling mindlessly, the challenge of video poker is extremely appealing.

All of this comes in a package that is very easy to learn. It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes and a couple of hands to get the hang of video poker. In the meantime, we’re here to help you out with this basic, step-by-step tutorial.

Step 1: Starting up Play

To begin play at a video poker machine, you’ll have to create a bankroll, which is just the name for the money that you will be using to gamble. You can do this by inserting money or a redemption ticket into the machine. When you are playing video poker online, you’ll need to create an account at the site of your choice.

Whatever funding you put in to play video poker will be registered as credits or coins. Every hand that you play will require you to wager at least one of those coins. Each credit will be equal to the amount of the denomination that you are playing.

Denominations can run from as low as a penny or nickel to higher amounts like a dollar. To determine how many credits you’ll have to play with at a video poker machine, simply divide the amount of money you’ve entered by the amount of the denomination. For example, $20 entered into a 25-cent machine will give you 80 credits (20 divided by .25).

Step 2: Deciding on Your Bet

The first decision that you’ll have to make when playing Shockwave video poker or any type of video poker for that matter is how much you are going to bet. In fact, betting is part of the game’s strategy. That’s because the way to max out your potential winnings is also to max out your potential bet for each hand.

Earlier, we told you that the royal flush is the most lucrative hand in the game. But its payout actually differs depending on how much you bet. At most machines, it pays out 250 to 1 when you are playing one through four coins and 800 to 1 when you are playing the max bet of five coins.

If you are a casual player who doesn’t plan on playing a lot of video poker, you might be able to get away with playing less than five coins because your chances of getting a royal flush are slim. But if you did get it while playing less than the max bet, think of how disappointed you might be. While the payout is still large, it is nothing compared to the five-coin amount.

Meanwhile, if you are planning to make video poker your regular game at the casino, you really need to make the maximum wager your steady bet. You will be limiting your payback percentage otherwise, since your odds of eventually making a royal flush rise as you start to play hundreds upon hundreds of hands. If you don’t think that you can make that financial commitment, you are better off lowering your denomination until you can afford the max bet.

Step 3: Playing a Hand of Video Poker

Like five card draw poker, video poker is broken down into the deal and the draw. You will be trying to make the best possible five-card hand out of those two rounds. The big difference is that you are not trying to beat other players at the table, but instead, you will be trying to make a hand that is considered a winner by the pay table at the machine you’re playing.

Considering there are many twists on video poker, it’s not unusual to see certain pay tables that create different twists on what constitutes a winning hand. But Shockwave video poker uses the same format as Jacks or Better, which means that the basic winning hands hold true. They are:

• 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)

Your hand of video poker begins once you have made your bet. You’ll receive five cards on your screen, which will be sourced from a digital reproduction of a standard 52-card deck. The software inside the machine is always shuffling this deck and will spit out the top five cards the moment that you press that “Deal” button.

It’s important to know that so you don’t get caught up in misconceptions about video poker. Every deal and draw during gameplay is random. Your chances of receiving specific cards remain unchanging, no matter how long you’ve been playing the game or what has transpired in previous hands.

When you get your deal, you should assess it to see what kinds of combinations that you have that might be similar to the winning hands listed above. Ideally, your deal might have a winning hand already contained. But even if not, the draw round is yet to come with a chance to improve your hand.

The draw is when you get the chance to exert some strategy on the proceedings. You can hold all of your cards, discard all of your cards, or hold and discard a combination. Your goal is to hold the cards that are useful to you and discard the ones that aren’t, knowing that the discarded ones will be replaced by others in the deck which can potentially improve the hand.

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

The good news is that this hand is already one that will pay you back your original wager, since you have a pair of jacks. You could stick with them and get rid of the other three cards. With any luck, you might improve them to three of a kind, a full house or even four of a kind.

There is also a stretch of four cards in consecutive rank if you look at the nine, ten, jack, and queen. That means that you are just one card away from a straight. If you discarded one of the jacks, you would have an 8 in 47 chance of making the straight, since you can make it with any of the four eights or kings left in the deck from which you were dealt, which still has 47 cards in it.

Finally, you might also notice that the nine, ten, and jack of spades puts you just two cards away from the straight flush. That is one of the highest-paying hands in all the game. But to make it, you would need to hit just the right card on both of your draws, which gives you a relatively small chance.

What you have to do is weigh your potential winnings against the possibility of actually making those winning hands. In this case, you have a pretty tough choice since there are so many options. Other video poker deals won’t be quite so tricky and you’ll be able to make a more obvious choice.

In any case, that is how strategy plays a big part in video poker. Once you have made your choice, you will press the “Hold” buttons underneath the cards that wish you to keep. The machine will then give you your draw, at which point, the hand is over and any winnings will be accumulated.

And that’s how it’s done. It’s a simple process and, as we said, it’s essentially the same when you’re playing Shockwave video poker. But the pay tables, especially the ones that are activated with a four of a kind hand, are where the differences start to come into the picture.

Shockwave Video Poker Pay Tables

When you are dealing with Shockwave video poker, you will be aware of two sets of pay tables. They are identical except for the payout on a four of a kind hand. And, oddly enough, the four of a kind hand is what activates the four of a kind.

The pay tables in any kind of video poker are important pieces of information. Knowing what each hand pays out should help you to decide on your strategy for what you should hold and discard on each deal. And the pay tables will also let you know if you are playing a version of the game that will yield a competitive payback or one that is a bit lacking.

In terms of Shockwave video poker, here is what the basic pay table looks like for the highest-paying version of the game. This is the pay table that will be in place until a four of a kind is hit during gameplay:

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	12	24	36	48	60
Flush	8	16	24	32	40
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

Let’s compare this to the full-pay Jacks or Better pay table:

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	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

Comparing the two, you’ll see that the Shockwave video poker pay table does better than the Jacks or Better game in the full house, flush, and straight payouts. This means that you’ll get more out of mid-priced hands playing Shockwave. It also means that you should bump them up in your estimation when you’re deciding which hands you’re trying to make.

But what ultimately turns out to be the big difference between the two is the payoff for two pair. When playing Jacks or Better, you get paid 2 to 1, yet the Shockwave pay table only returns you even money, which means you’ll just get your original bet back.

If you’ve never played video poker before, you might not think that this is a big deal. But in actuality, it makes the Jacks or Better pay table far more beneficial than if you were playing Shockwave video poker. Why is that the case?

It’s because two pair is a hand that you’ll be able to make with regularity playing video poker, around once every 10 hands. When you aren’t getting that 2 to 1 boost, it becomes harder to sustain your bankroll as you go for the bigger hands like the ones that pay more on the Shockwave pay table.

Let’s talk about it in terms of payback percentage. The Jacks or Better pay table above pays back gamblers 99.54%, which means that they are losing an average of only 46 cents on $100 worth of gameplay. By contrast, the Shockwave video poker pay table, as it is, would pay pack only 95.2%, meaning an average loss of $4.80 on every $100 put into the machine.

That is a significant difference, one that would make Shockwave video poker a less than enviable game to play if it didn’t go beyond that. After all, we recommend only games that average a payback percentage of 99% or higher. With that kind of payback, you can expect to make up any expected losses in casino rewards, thereby potentially earning a profit.

Luckily, Shockwave video poker finds a way to get to that 99% level with a little help from its unique twist. When you manage to get a four of a kind hand, you will get paid for that hand from the basic pay table. Then, you also enter into “Shockwave” mode.
Shockwave mode lasts for 10 hands, although it will end if you get four of a kind before those 10 hands are up. And you will play those hands with the following 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	800	1600	2400	3200	4000
Full house	12	24	36	48	60
Flush	8	16	24	32	40
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

Right away, you’ll see the big difference, and that is that the four of a kind hands in Shockwave mode pay off at a stunning 800 to 1. That means that you will actually be paid higher for four of a kind in that mode than you would for a royal flush at one through four coins played. At five coins played, they would each be worth 4,000 coins!

Shockwave mode might not come into play that often, but when it does, it immediately lifts the payback percentage into another stratosphere. When you put both the basic pay table and the Shockwave pay table together and combine all the probabilities, the payback percentage rises to 99.55%. That is well above our recommended total of 99% and even outdoes Jacks or
Better by a small amount.

But you have to realize that the style of play for Shockwave is much different than Jacks or Better because of how you get to those payback amounts. When you play Jacks or Better, you can usually sustain gameplay for a long time while keeping your bankroll relatively stable. The 2 to 1 payoff for two pair helps you to do this.

With Shockwave video poker, you will be prone to much wider swings of momentum. That’s because so much of the payback is tied into Shockwave mode which, while certainly something you can expect when playing the game for a long time, won’t likely come around very often. If you can get to it early during a session, your bankroll should be solid, especially if you can hit the four of a kind in Shockwave mode.

If you can’t however, and you’re losing around five dollars for every 100 you play, you will struggle to stay afloat. That’s what makes Shockwave video poker a good game for those who love jackpots. But it isn’t something that you should play if you expect to play for a long time with only a modest bankroll to start.

You also have to keep in mind that you might not be able to find the full-pay table that is listed above in either a casino or an online gambling site. There are other pay tables which will lead to reduced payback percentages. Here is a quick sample of those pay tables. Keep in mind that the Shockwave mode payout of 800 to 1 for four of a kind is still the same in these pay tables as well:

11/8/5 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	11	22	33	44	55
Flush	8	16	24	32	40
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

10/8/5 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	10	20	30	40	50
Flush	8	16	24	32	40
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

10/7/5 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	10	20	30	40	50
Flush	7	14/td>	21	28	35
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

9/6/5 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	9	18	27	36	45
Flush	6	12	18	24	30
Straight	5	10	15	20	25
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pairs	1	2	3	4	5
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

9/6/4 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	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
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

The numbers above the pay tables refer to the payouts for the full house, flush, and straight hands. It’s a way to shorthand naming these pay tables, since these are the only payouts that change. Take a close look at these payouts when you encounter Shockwave video poker so that you know exactly what you’re getting, and you can locate the best-paying game available to you at that time.

Shoackwave Video Poker Strategy

The main thing you have to realize about strategy for Shockwave video poker is that you really have to look for four of a kind hands very aggressively. Since much of the payback comes from Shockwave mode, you have to try to get to it as often as possible. And once you’re in this mode, you have to sell out even more for the four of a kind hands.

Consider also the fact that two pair only pays off even money, which is the same as you would receive from a pair of jacks or better. That means that you should consider, when you receive two pair on the deal, throwing out one of them, especially if the other pair consists of jacks or better. You are better off there playing for the four of a kind instead of going for the slight chance of making a full house.

Barring those suggestions, the best way to learn video poker strategy is to get some help. Remember that imperfect strategy, making mathematically incorrect decisions about what to hold and what to discard while playing your hands, will lead to a reduced payback percentage over the long haul. For that reason, beginners should really look into one of
the following two methods of improving your strategy:

• Video Poker Trainers: These can be used to improve play by downloading them onto a computer or tablet. A trainer allows you to simulate gameplay and customize the instruction to a specific pay table. When you make a mistake with a hold and discard, the software will let you know so that you will learn the right way to play the hand.
• Strategy Charts: Strategy charts are easily found online and can be printed out and, ideally, memorized. These charts rank all the combinations of cards you might get on a deal from the most valuable to the least. Once you have this information in your head, you’ll know which combination in your hand is the best and which cards can be discarded.

Pros and Cons of Shockwave Video Poker

Conclusion on Shockwave Video Poker

Shockwave video poker, whether you play it at a casino or as part of a top gambling website, is the game for those who have huge payouts on their mind. Get into Shockwave mode, get four of a kind, and get rich quick is the motto. If you fall short of that mode, however, it could be easy come, easy go.