How to Play Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker

Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker takes the concept of Bonus Poker pay tables and really pushes it to an extreme. Payoffs for four of a kind hands increase dramatically from what you could expect from basic Bonus Poker. To compensate, the pay tables for the game lessen the payouts for certain common winning hands.

Video poker creates excitement for gamblers by simulating the play of Five-Card Draw poker in a self-contained machine. As far as gambling games available in casinos go, video poker stands out as one of the best. You can learn how to play in minutes, you can use strategy to improve your chances of winning, and you can benefit from lucrative pay tables.

If you have only just begun to play video poker, you might only know the game in its most basic form, Jacks or Better. Jacks or Better pays off winning hands based strictly on how frequently those hands are expected to show up during gameplay. The less frequently they appear, the more they pay, and vice versa.

For some, Jacks or Better’s gameplay stagnates after a while. You might have a decent chance of grinding out winnings over a long period of time. But your chances of scoring a big payoff on a single hand aren’t very strong.

Video poker manufacturers responded to the demand for more chances at high single-hand payouts with Bonus Poker pay tables. These pay tables upped the payback for four of a kind hands.

Why Choose Triple Bonus Poker

Simple Bonus Poker games led to pay tables that upped the ante even further in terms of four of a kind payback. Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker makes for one of the more aggressive Bonus Poker pay tables you’ll find. It takes the basic pay structure for Bonus Poker and weighs it even more heavily to four of a kind hands.

If you can manage a four of a kind during Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker, you can expect the kind of winnings you could only receive in Jacks or Better by hitting a royal flush, which is the rarest hand of all. That means you can possibly see the kind of quick payout you might only expect from slot machines, which are governed by pure luck and have no strategy involved.

For that increased payout on the four of a kind hands, Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker makes some concessions elsewhere on the pay table. In particular, payout for a hand of two pair is reduced to even money. Since two pair is a hand that will show up much more than four of a kind, the small discount will help to depress your overall payback.

In the following article, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. We’ll explain how to play a hand and how the pay tables make such a difference in this unique setup. Finally, we’ll tell you about payback percentages and strategy, two important concepts if you are planning on playing the game on a regular basis.

The Advantages of Video Poker

Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker represents just one variation of many on the casino game that many serious gamblers feel tops all others. And those who gamble online love it, too. You can find most of the major variations of video poker as part of a gambling website if you look hard enough.

If you’ve never played video poker, you might think that it’s similar to slot machines. After all, you can usually find video poker machines in the same part of the casino as the slots. Well, video poker is similar to slots in a few ways, but, in the most important ways, it’s different.

When you play, it’s just you and the machine. You don’t need to worry about any hassles from anybody else. In addition, slot machines and video poker translate very well to the online gambling experience.

But video poker really leaves slot machines behind aside from those basic similarities. For one, you get a chance to apply some strategy when you’re playing video poker. When playing slot machines, you won’t have any such chance.

On top of that, video poker is based on the probabilities that come with playing with a deck of 52 cards. That takes a lot of the guesswork out of trying to determine how often certain winning hands might show up. By contrast, you’ll have no idea the frequency with which certain winning slot machine spins will show up on your screen.

Video poker also allows you to compute a payback percentage by combining payouts on the specific pay table with the probabilities of making winning hands. Again, it clarifies the situation for the gambler. Those playing slot machines have no way of knowing how much the specific machines they choose will pay out on average.

Speaking of payouts, video poker machines generally come out way ahead of slot machines in that department. And they even stay competitive with many table games.

Put all of that together and you have a game that’s easy to play in a hassle-free environment. It lets you use strategy and clues you in to how often you can expect winning hands and what your payback will be. And you can play it online with no problems at all.

Sound good? If it does, you need to learn how to play, if you haven’t already. Let’s walk you through the process of playing a hand of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker.

Playing Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker

Step 1: Staking Yourself to a Bankroll

When you play video poker, you create your bankroll with the money you put into the machine. If you’re playing online, your bankroll comes from an online account that you’ll fund at the gambling website of your choice.

You’ll see that the money you allot for play gets converted on the screen to credits or coins. Each of these units corresponds to the denomination of the machine you’re playing. In other words, if you’re playing a 25-cent machine, one credit would equal 25 cents, 2 credits would equal 50 cents, and so on.

How much of a bankroll you want to establish will depend on your goals and desires for playing the game. If you just want to play a few hands and take a stab at a jackpot, you won’t need much. But if you want to play Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker at a level where you can maximize your winnings, you’ll need to prepare a bigger bankroll.

As a result, you might want to beef up your bankroll a bit. A bigger bankroll will allow you to stay afloat longer and give you more chances at hitting the high-paying hands on the pay table.

Step 2: Deciding on Your Wager

When you play Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker, you will be deciding on a wager of anywhere from one to five coins for each hand that you play. You can switch the size of your bet every hand if you choose to do so. Or you can keep your bet stable so that you can play the game more quickly.

Your best strategy when it comes to betting on hands of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker is to wager the maximum five coins every hand that you play. Doing so gives you the best odds for the royal flush, which is the rarest hand in all of video poker and also the highest paying.

If you bet between one and four coins, playing Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker and hit a royal flush, you’ll get paid back 250 coins for every one that you bet. That’s a pretty substantial payout.
But it’s nothing compared to 800 coins for every one that you bet. That’s what you’ll receive if you get a royal flush on a five-coin bet. Such a massive difference demands that you go for the so-called “max bet” every hand that you play.

If betting much on each hand drains your bankroll more quickly than you’d like, find a game with a lower denomination. Just don’t skim and wager less than five coins. You’ll be sorry if you get that royal flush.

Step 3: Playing a Hand

Once you make your wager, you’ll be ready to play out a hand of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. If you’ve ever played the card game known as Five-Card Draw, you should be able to recognize the rhythm of play. You get a deal and a draw and are trying to make the best five-card poker hand that you can manage.

Five-Card Draw Poker does the same, but you’ll be trying to beat everyone at the table to win the pot. If you don’t have the cards to win that way, you can also bluff your opponents into folding their cards.

But there are no real opponents in video poker. Nor do you have to worry about bluffing. You just have to make a combination of cards that the pay table for Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker deems to be a winning one.

Here are the winning hands you’ll be trying to make when playing Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker:

• 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)

These hands are listed from easiest to achieve (on top) to hardest to achieve (on bottom), based on poker probabilities. For the most part, the payback gets higher as you move down the list. The only exception to that in Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker is that four of a kind pays higher than the straight flush even though it will likely appear more often during gameplay.

You’ll ideally have all of that information in the back of your mind as the five cards for your deal appear on your screen. Remember that each deal, and each draw for that matter, is random. Don’t go looking for patterns or else you could talk yourself into a poor decision.

When you see the five cards that you get on the deal, you’ll consider whether any of the combinations either make up or are close to making up a winning hand. You’ll also consider which of the cards from the deal aren’t really a part of any potential winning combination. These can be discarded and replaced with something else from the deck.

That process is known as the draw and it completes a hand of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. But first, you have to make your decision. Let’s take a look at sample deal to see how this might work.

Imagine that this is your deal:

This deal does not provide you with any winning combinations according to the Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pay table. But it’s close in several different ways.

You have a pair of sevens. While it falls short of the threshold of a pair of Jacks or Better, you can get rid of the other three cards and perhaps draw to something better. Three of a kind, a full house, and four of a kind are all within reach if you make that choice.

You should also notice that you have four cards of consecutive rank with the seven through the ten. If you were to draw a six or a jack after discarding one of the sevens, you’d have a straight.

Finally, you also have the seven, nine, and ten of spades. Not only does that make up three out of five needed for a flush, but it also is only two cards short of a straight flush. Keep in mind that the straight flush is one of the highest-paying hands in the game.

Well, you have to weigh the possibilities of making any of the winning hands listed above against the payouts for them. For example, the most likely winning outcome if you keep the pair of sevens is three of a kind. You might get lucky and get to the full house or four of a kind, but it’s not likely. Yet you have many chances on the draw to get one of the two remaining sevens in the deck.

You have an even better chance of drawing a single card that would turn out to be a six or a jack to make your straight. But you only have that one chance to do it, since you would only be drawing one card. And you have to decide if the mid-priced payout is worth it.

If you keep the seven, nine, and ten of spades, you’ll need a very lucky draw to make the straight flush. But you might want to take that chance since you have the prospect of such a high payout in play.

Each and every video poker hand that you play will provide you with decisions about what to hold and what to discard. They won’t all be this tough, of course. Often, the choice will be so obvious that you can make it in an instant.

Once you make your choice on which cards to hold (if any; you can discard all five) and which cards to discard (if any; you can also hold all five), you will press the buttons under the cards that you wish to hold. You’ll then hit the draw button and your discarded cards will be replaced by cards from the top of the deck that dealt to you in the first place.

That last part is important to remember. It means that there are 47 cards remaining after the deal, which means there are 47 cards from which you can draw. In addition, it means you can’t get a card that you were dealt on the draw, even if you just discarded it.

That is how a hand of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker works. Now that you have that under control, let’s talk about the unique pay tables in place for this game.

Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker Pay Tables

When you look at a pay table, you are seeing more than just what each winning hand will pay back for that specific video poker variation, although that’s obviously a big part of it. You are also seeing something which should help dictate your strategy. It should also clue you in to what kind of bankroll you should establish to play the game for a long time.

In the case of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker, the pay table will show you how aggressively the game pays out for four of a kind hands. You’ll also see the pay for other hands boosted a bit as well. Let’s observe what the full-pay pay table of this game looks like:

Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker Pay Table

Coins/Hands	1 coin	2 coins	3 coins	4 coins	5 coins
Royal flush	250	500	750	1000	4000
Straight flush	100	200	300	400	500
Four of a kind (aces)	240	480	720	960	1200
Four of a kind (2s, 3s, or 4s)	120	240	360	480	600
Four of a kind (any other)	50	100	150	200	250
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 pair	2	4	6	8	10
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

To read the pay table, follow the rows of winning hands over to the betting columns. For instance, imagine that you wagered five coins and made Three of a Kind. Follow the “three of a kind” row over to the “5 coins” column and you’ll see that you’ve won 15 coins.

As we said earlier, Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker bases its pay table on the winning hands from a Bonus Poker pay table. Bonus Poker separates pay for four of a kind hands depending on which rank is involved. Jacks or Better awards all four of a kind hands the same.

But Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker contains many differences in its pay table from Bonus Poker. Let’s take a look at the most common Bonus Poker pay table that you’ll find in casinos and on gambling websites to compare:

Bonus Poker 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)	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 pair	2	4	6	8	10
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

See if you can spot the differences. Obviously, Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pays significantly more on all four of a kind hands. And it also boosts payment on the straight flush.

Where it’s lacking is in the payout for two pair. Bonus Poker pays 2 to 1 for two pair. Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pays just even money for the same hand.

Well, two pair will appear often when you play video poker for a long time, about one in every 10 hands. When you consider that your pay will be discounted for all of those two pair hands, you can see how Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker can compensate for the greatly increased four of a kind payouts.

You also need to realize that the pay table we listed above for Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker isn’t the only one you’re likely to find. There are other pay tables which actually pay less. In particular, payback for the full house hand is reduced in these pay tables.

Here are some of the other available Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pay tables:

Coins/Hands	1 coin	2 coins	3 coins	4 coins	5 coins
Royal flush	250	500	750	1000	4000
Straight flush	100	200	300	400	500
Four of a kind (aces)	240	480	720	960	1200
Four of a kind (2s, 3s, or 4s)	120	240	360	480	600
Four of a kind (any other)	50	100	150	200	250
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 pair	2	4	6	8	10
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

Coins/Hands	1 coin	2 coins	3 coins	4 coins	5 coins
Royal flush	250	500	750	1000	4000
Straight flush	100	200	300	400	500
Four of a kind (aces)	240	480	720	960	1200
Four of a kind (2s, 3s, or 4s)	120	240	360	480	600
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	3	6	9	12	15
Two pair	2	4	6	8	10
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

Coins/Hands	1 coin	2 coins	3 coins	4 coins	5 coins
Royal flush	250	500	750	1000	4000
Straight flush	100	200	300	400	500
Four of a kind (aces)	240	480	720	960	1200
Four of a kind (2s, 3s, or 4s)	120	240	360	480	600
Four of a kind (any other)	50	100	150	200	250
Full house	6	12	18	24	30
Flush	5	10	15	20	25
Straight	4	8	12	16	20
Three of a kind	3	6	9	12	15
Two pair	2	4	6	8	10
Jacks or better	1	2	3	4	5

Volatility and Payback Percentage

This section is for those who are hoping to play Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker regularly and perhaps even grind out a profit playing the game. Casual players won’t need to be concerned with these topics. After all, when you’re only playing video poker once in a blue moon, luck will end up governing your winning or losing more than anything else.

The payback percentage of a video poker game is a mathematical estimation of how much the player will return from his hypothetical bankroll. 100% payback percentage means that the player will break even. Higher than 100% means they can expect to make money, while under 100% means they can expect to lose money.

In the case of video poker, we feel that any game with a payback percentage higher than 99% is worth playing. Even though you would still be losing money at the 99% level, the losses would be small. So small, in fact, that you could use casino rewards or loyalty programs at top gambling sites to compensate for them and come out ahead.

The good news is that the payback percentage for the full-pay Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pay table sits at a robust 99.8%, above our threshold. Once you start going down through the lesser pay tables with the reduced payout for a full house, the payback percentage will fall below that level.

Volatility in Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker

Now, it’s time to talk about how volatility factors into that equation. Volatility measures the way that a bankroll rises and falls while you’re playing video poker.

Think of it in terms of the stock market. A highly volatile stock’s price will rise and fall between a large range or prices in very little time at all. By contrast, a low volatile stock will stay around the same level for a long time.

That would be a big mistake because, according to the probabilities, you will eventually start hitting some of those four of a kind hands to make your bankroll soar. You’ll need to protect against that by making sure your bankroll is substantial enough to handle the down periods that are bound to come.

On the other hand, if you only plan on playing Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker for a short period of time with the intent of maybe scoring a big jackpot, you won’t mind the volatility. If anything, it will play into what you’re seeking from the game.

Strategy for Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker

We talked about the fact that you get the chance to use strategy when you play a video poker game like Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. In fact, the better strategy that you use, the better your chances of making money playing the game. That’s why it’s important to learn the right way to play.

By the “right way”, we mean the mathematically correct combination of holds and discards for each possible deal. There is one play that will unlock the highest expected value for any deal that you might receive. And the way the pay table is set up will change the way certain hands should be played from other pay tables.

As an example, take a look at the following deal:

If you were playing the Bonus Poker pay table listed above, the right play here would be to keep the two pair. You would assure yourself of a 2 to 1 payoff. Plus, if you managed to get a four or an ace on the draw, you would end up with a full house.

But take a look again at the Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. It pays the same for two pair as it does for a pair of jacks or better. You have both in that hand, because the fours and aces make up the two pair and the aces make up the jacks or better.

Also keep in mind that four aces, which represents a massive payout in Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker, can only remain a possibility if you discard everything but the pair of aces. Even though this is a long shot on the draw, going for it is the right play in this situation. The reward justifies the risk, and going with the two pair really doesn’t do much for your potential winnings.

We recommend utilizing one of the following two methods to achieve perfect play while playing Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. Either one will get you where you need to go.

Video Poker Training Software

If you purchase a good training software program, you can simulate play for any pay table you want. In other words, you can plug in the values for the Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker pay table so you can make sure that the instruction you receive is right on target for that specific game.

Training software works by letting you play sample hands of Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker. Each time you make a decision about a hold and discard that is mathematically incorrect, the software will let you know and tell you the right play. In this way, you will learn perfect play through repetition.

Strategy Charts

Strategy charts work by listing combinations of cards you might receive on the deal from highest expected value to lowest. Look at your hand to see what combination is highest ranked. Then, discard the cards that aren’t included.

The hard part of working with strategy charts is that you need to memorize them. That’s the only way you can take all that information with you. If you take the time to do it, however, you will be rewarded with perfect play.

Conclusion on Triple Bonus Poker Plus Video Poker

Triple Bonus Poker Plus video poker gives you great incentive to push for four of a kind hands. It also gives you more opportunities for monster payoffs than most other Bonus Poker-style video poker games. But the volatility level might scare you away if you don’t have a big bankroll to start.