One of the first questions that new video poker players have is how to play draws. There are three main types of draws that you have to worry about in Jacks or Better: flush draws, straight draws and royal flush draws. These three types of draws can be held relative to the two types of single-pair hands: high pairs and low pairs. High pairs are jacks or higher, and low pairs are tens or lower. High pairs are worth a lot more than low pairs because they have the ability to get payouts no matter what comes after the discard, so the difference between the pairs is a good marker to use.

So here's how this works. Four to a royal flush is more important than any made hand that's not already a straight flush, so obviously it's better than a high pair. A high pair is better than three to a royal flush. With that being said, three to a royal is a stronger draw than four to a regular flush. This is a very important thing to keep in mind because it's where a lot of new players frequently miss out on a ton of value. It seems anti-intuitive to go with a three-card draw over a four-card draw, but the higher payouts and chances for making other hands like high pairs shore up the difference.

Four to a flush is stronger than a low pair, and a low pair is stronger than four to an eight-out straight draw. One of the key things to build an understanding of is that flush draws are much, much stronger than straight draws in jacks or better. There are two reasons for this. First, a flush draw is more likely to hit than a straight draw because you have nine cards that can make your hand instead of eight. Second, a flush draw pays out five times the size of your bet while a straight draw only pays out four times the size of your bet.

Overall, learning how to play these three types of draws effectively is based mostly on knowing where they fall relative to major made hands like high pairs and low pairs. If you can do that, then you will cover 90 percent or more of the difficult decisions that you have to make as a novice player in Jacks or Better video poker.