Joker Poker is Amusnet's video poker game that slips a joker in with the usual 52 cards. That 53rd card takes the place of whichever card you are missing: with it, a pair becomes three of a kind and four hearts make a flush. Everything else follows the pattern of a classic machine: five cards, one draw, then a payout according to the paytable on screen.
At Casino King, a hand is played from €0.10 to €10 and can pay up to 950 times the stake. The game is one of six titles grouped together for casino video poker. What follows looks at what sets it apart from the others: what the joker changes when you choose your cards, and what it does to the odds.
Amusnet released Joker Poker on 10 December 2014. The Sofia studio built it around a single screen, with the paytable always in view and four buttons to play a hand: Deal, Draw, Collect and Gamble. There are no reels and no paylines. It may look like a machine, but what you build is a genuine poker hand, card by card.
Its publisher rates its volatility at 2 out of 5. Wins therefore come along fairly regularly, mostly for modest amounts, while the 950× cap is kept for the rarest hands. At Casino King it sits mainly among dice slots and roulettes in the range of Amusnet games, with just one other game of this type from the same studio.
You first pick your stake, between €0.10 and €10 a hand, then press Deal. Five cards appear, taken from a 53-card deck. You tap the ones you want to hold; the others go when you press Draw, and cards from the same deck replace them. There is only one draw per hand, and a discarded card never comes back.
The final hand is assessed automatically. If it includes the joker, the machine gives it whichever value makes the best possible hand: you have nothing to declare. The win shows on screen, and you choose whether to collect it or put it back into play with the Gamble option.
An autoplay mode runs a set number of hands in a row and stops with a single click whenever you like. The game history keeps your rounds for 30 days, including stake, win and final hand. And if the connection drops mid-deal, the hand picks up where it left off the next time you open the game.
The joker counts as any card, rank and suit included. With two pairs it completes a full house; with three of a kind it makes four of a kind; with four cards of the same rank it creates a hand unknown to classic poker, five of a kind. A straight with one card missing from the middle is completed by it too.
One exception follows from the very definition of the top hand. A natural royal flush, ten, jack, queen, king and ace of the same suit, is made of real cards only. If the joker stands in for one of them, the hand becomes a wild royal flush, a separate combination. The pay schedule shows what each of the two is worth.
The paytable stays on screen throughout the game. Each line matches a combination with what it pays, as a multiple of the stake. The lowest combination listed is the smallest paying hand: anything below it pays nothing. That makes it the line to read before your first deal, because it varies from one video poker game to the next.
Further up, the table follows the usual order of how poker hands rank, plus the two hands only the joker makes possible: five of a kind and the wild royal flush. The top win is capped at 950 times the stake, which comes to €9,500 at the maximum stake of €10.
The game rules at Casino King state a return to player of 98.47%. Across a very long run of hands, an average of €98.47 goes back to players for every €100 staked, and the 1.53% difference is the game's margin. The studio's own sheet quotes 99.31%: each casino picks one of the settings Amusnet offers, and the figure in the game rules is the one that applies to the table in front of you.
When the joker turns up in your first five cards, one rule has no exceptions: you hold it. It can never weaken a hand, and throwing it away means handing back the most useful card in the deck. What it already completes then settles the rest, in most deals:
joker and a pair: three of a kind is made, hold those three cards and draw the other two, with an 8.2% chance of ending on at least four of a kind;
joker and three of a kind: you have four of a kind, and the card you draw gives a one-in-48 chance (2.1%) of five of a kind;
joker and four cards of the same suit: the flush is made, and as a rule you keep it whole;
joker and four cards in sequence: the straight is complete, hold all five cards.
Without the joker, sorting your cards follows the logic of classic video poker, with one notable difference: the joker is still in the deck and can arrive on the draw, which gives every unfinished hand one extra chance. If you would rather play with 52 cards, 4 of a kind Bonus Poker, from the same studio, has no joker and rewards four of a kind more generously.
A 53-card deck gives 2,869,685 different starting hands. Here is what the first five cards bring, before any draw:
the joker appears in 270,725 of them, one deal in 10.6 (9.4 per cent);
five of a kind dealt outright: once in 220,745 deals;
a wild royal flush: once in 143,484;
a natural royal flush: once in 717,421, five times less often than the wild one.
On the draw, the joker counts as one more winning card. Hold two pairs, and 5 of the 48 remaining cards complete the full house, the four cards still available in those two ranks plus the joker, for a 10.4% chance. Four cards of the same suit become a flush with 10 cards out of 48 (20.8%), and four cards in sequence that can be extended at either end become a straight with 9 out of 48 (18.8%). These odds apply when the joker is not already in your hand.
After each winning hand, the Gamble button offers to put the win back into play. A face-down card appears and you call red or black. Call it right and the win doubles, and you can go again or collect; call it wrong and it is lost. The number of attempts is set by the game's configuration, and the rules point out that a card's colour can never be worked out from the ones before it.
Joker Poker is also one of the Amusnet games linked to Jackpot Cards. When the feature triggers, at random at the end of a round, twelve face-down cards appear. You turn them over until three matching symbols show, clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades, which point to one of the four levels. Contributions are calculated as a percentage of the stake without taking anything from it, and a Jackpot Cards win can never go into the Gamble option.
Of all the buttons, Gamble is the one that moves a balance fastest, in both directions. Deciding before the session whether you will use it, and up to what amount, saves making that call in the rush of a win. The tools in your account also let you set yourself limits before you start.
In demo mode, Joker Poker plays with the same rules and the same pay schedule, without real money. It is the place to try out the choices described above before you stake anything. The game runs in your browser, on a computer or a smartphone, with no app to install.
To play with a stake, simply top up your player account once registration and the identity check are complete; the game is reserved for players aged 21 or older. Joker Poker runs there under licence B+19763, held by Casino King, the online Belgian casino supervised by the Gaming Commission.