A free online collection of various video poker games, including replicas of the styles found on casino floors and at online betting sites.
This is an online “free gambling” site somewhat like myVEGAS and Caesar’s Casino, but it actually has a lot more going on in terms of prizes right now.
As the name indicates, the site is centered around video poker, and you can play pretty much every flavor you’ll see in actual casinos. The interface and even the sound effects are patterned after Game King and other very common machines. But you can also play keno — Classic, Four Card, Caveman, Multi-Card without a subscription, and a VP Gold subscription adds Cleopatra and Power Keno.
Each hand of VP or keno game gives you one reward point, and there’s no limit on how many you can play. However, there’s only a real limited range of prizes and the thresholds for cashing out are super high. They start in the tens of thousands for a month of VP Gold subscription time and range all the way up to three million for three nights at the MGM Signature in Vegas!
Forget the redemption prizes, the real point of interest is in the contests. There are daily, weekly and monthly video poker contests with an actual cash prize for the highest scorer and lesser prizes for the top 10. Playing in these contests also earns entries for a regular prize drawing, usually something decent (for example as I write this it’s an iPad Air).
So while this one is a little more contest-based than grinding to earn guaranteed prizes, it’s a pretty easy and low time commitment contest that’s available every day and can lead to actual cash. And maybe the points you hoard up in the background will actually be redeemable for something better than golf balls and coffee mugs eventually.
Oh, and they also have some sort of a poker room that advertises real cash and prizes for playing with virtual chips that renew daily for free. However, as with the Facebook WSOP game, it doesn’t seem to want to run for me right now so I’m low on information there.
If you’re interested in playing video poker in an actual casino, this is the best practice tool I’ve seen yet due to the fidelity to actual Game King/etc. machines, the various trainer tools they have and the forum. You need a VP Gold subscription to use the detailed trainer that actually coaches you on each hand you play, but newcomers get a free week of that and you can buy more time using the rewards points you earn instead of cash (paying cash is $25 per year). Free users can still take advantage of a “quiz mode” that teaches you some of the important points of Jacks or Better, Double Double Bonus and Deuces Wild. It’s actually kinda hard to find commercial offline software that does all this stuff well.
Full disclosure: the links to this one are affiliate links, but they will give you 5,000 reward points to start out with no strings (I get the same amount once you play 100 hands or 100 games of keno).
Links
Useful Supporting Products:
- Video Poker Optimum Play – Good guide covering the mathematically most sound plays for each situation in each popular video poker variant
- Million Dollar Video Poker – More of a “just for fun” read now, as casinos have adjusted their machines specifically in response to how Bob Dancer took advantage of them in the ’90s, but a good one