Super Draw 6 Card Poker

The video poker variant known as Super Draw 6 Card Poker was launched by leading casino game manufacturer International Game Technology in 2015.

Soon thereafter Super Draw 6 Card Poker machines began appearing in casinos like the Venetian and Treasure Island on the Las Vegas Strip, and an online version of the game was created by the IGT Interactive division. Today, you can play this exciting new addition to the video poker landscape in both live casinos and reputable online platforms that utilize IGT Interactive software.

As the recognized industry authority in video poker offshoots, IGT dominates more than 90 percent of the market for video poker machines through creative variants like Super Hand Poker. In the case of Super Draw 6 Card Poker, the title says it all, as players are granted a sixth card during the discard and draw round of a hand. In other words, when you hold two cards and discard three, you’ll receive the usual three replacement cards plus one additional card – giving you six cards with which to form the best possible five card poker hand.

For any video poker regular who has watched in vain as the screen flashed four of the five cards needed to make crucial hands like straight flushes, and the elusive royal flush, the benefit of adding a sixth card to the equation becomes eminently clear. When playing Super Draw 6 Card Poker, players enjoy a “juiced” gameplay experience, or one in which more winning hands tend to appear courtesy of the sixth drawn card.

Adding to the dynamic gameplay, IGT has integrated multiple hand functionality into Super Draw 6 Card poker, so players can fire up three, five, or even 10 unique hands on each deal. In fact, the minimum number of hands you’ll take on every deal is set to three, so you’ll always have a trio of opportunities to complete draws or capitalize on pat hands.

Super Draw 6 Card Poker also utilizes the same two way payout system pioneered by IGT in video poker formats like Triple Play and the aforementioned Super Hand Poker. This means that you’ll earn a one time payout based on the strength of your initial five card hand, before taking a shot at earning three, five, or 10 payouts upon completing the draw.

Rather than running through the motions and auto clicking through holds, discards, and draws, Super Card 6 Card Poker keeps players riveted to the onscreen action through every step of the hand. That initial deal can produce decent payouts when you land something like two pair or three of a kind, before the ante is upped considerably during the multiple hand drawing round and the addition of a sixth card.

Finally, the good folks at IGT were sure to add even more dimensionality to Super Draw 6 Card Poker by including a suite of popular video poker variants within the machines mainframe. Instead of limiting the action to plain old Jacks or Better, the game allows players to toggle between a selection of widely played video poker formats, including Double Double Bonus and Deuces Wild.

Any fan of multiple hand video poker play will love Super Draw 6 Card Poker, as will veteran players who are looking for a little extra action to spice up their long sessions. This page was written to provide beginners with a clear look at the lay of the land, including a walkthrough on basic rules and gameplay, a primer on pay tables and their impact on your bottom line, and even a section devoted to proper strategy.

We mentioned this already, but it bears repeating: Super Draw 6 Card Poker was designed to offer a full fledged suite of video poker formats. This means you can alternate between the traditional Jacks or Better version of the game and additions like Deuces Wild. In each case, the game will switch the rules and settings to compensate, including the pay table (more on pay tables to come in the next section).

The seven video poker formats available on Super Draw 6 Card Poker machines are as follows:

Accordingly, we’ll skip over a full discussion of each video poker format and move directly into the nuts and bolts of Super Draw 6 Card Poker specifically. For readers who may not be entirely familiar with the divisions between video poker formats, you can brush up on the basics by checking out our Games section.

And to familiarize readers with the video poker family tree, take a look at the table below, which was provided by IGT within the Rules section for the online version of its Super Draw 6 Card Poker game:

Once again, each of the games listed above comes with its own unique pay table, owing to the fact that different rules emphasize certain hands. We’ll cover the pay tables for each game in detail during the following section, so stay tuned.

To begin our walkthrough of Super Draw 6 Card Poker gameplay, we’ll start at the very beginning then: selecting your game. To keep things as simple as possible, we’ll roll with classic Jacks or Better, the most reliably chosen video poker variant of them all.

In the game of Jacks or Better, the objective is to improve your initial five card starting hand using a single round of discards and draws. Upon the draw, the complete five card poker hand is then scored according to one of several standard pay tables, but the traditional poker hand hierarchy is situated as follows:

As you might’ve suspected already, the minimum hand one can play to earn a payout is one pair of Jacks or better, a threshold from which the game takes its name.

One thing to remember about Super Draw 6 Card Poker is the inclusion of that fateful sixth card, because with six cards to use, the normal poker hand rankings can be shaken up quite a bit. Imagine making a “super full house” with four of a kind plus one pair, or a longer royal flush that includes the 9 along with the 10 J Q K A in the same suit.

The full range of additional hands added to the equation thanks to the sixth card can be reviewed below:

Clearly, with seven additional poker hands created by the dealing of a sixth card, Super Draw 6 Card Poker lives up to its title.

Now that we’ve decided which format of video poker to play, let’s see what the Super Draw 6 Card Poker machine is really all about.

Thanks to IGT’s multiple hand functionality, you can set things up to deal out three, five, or 10 hands on each deal. This is accomplished by replicating the standard 52 card deck of playing cards, three, five, or 10 times over, and dealing out one unique hand from each.

We’ll lean towards simplicity once again and set the game for three hands at a time, a setup popularized by IGT’s Triple Play video poker offering.

With three hands selected, the in game screen will show three rows of five card silhouettes or spaces, for a total 15 card spaces in the main hand area. These will be arranged with five cards in a row on the bottom, five more in the middle, and five on the top.

Additionally, because Super Draw 6 Card Poker is based on dispensing a sixth card to every hand, each row of card spaces will include a sixth space on the far right hand side of the screen. This sixth card space is set just apart from the other five in its row, designating it as the sixth “bonus” card dealt to each completed hand.

This game is set up to allow for $0.05 (nickel), $0.10 (dime), and $0.25 (quarter), plays. Throughout the rest of this walkthrough, we’ll go with the nickel coin denomination preferred by the majority of recreational video poker players.

According to the game’s rules, players have to wager a minimum of five coins per hand, which comes to 15 coins in our three handed game. When playing with five hands, the minimum coin amount stands at 25, and it climbs to 50 for 10 handed games.

You’ll also need to double the amount as a premium in order to activate the sixth card feature. Because the game of Super Draw 6 Card Poker is simply multiple hand video poker without the sixth card being dealt, we’ll assume this feature as an automatic activation for all players.

At five nickels ($0.25) per hand, simply enjoying the standard three handed game would cost you $0.75, but that total is doubled when you turn on the sixth card feature (as you should). In that case, the cost to cover per play comes to $1.50 at the nickel stakes.

The list below shows the various cost per play rates for each of the three coin denominations found on Super Draw 6 Card Poker:

The mathematically inclined already know, but for the rest of us, the cost per play for a hand of Super Draw 6 Card Poker (with the sixth card feature activated) will always come to 30 times your chosen coin denomination. Under this setup, 15 coins are devoted to the base game and 15 coins are used to turn the sixth hand feature on.

In our example game we’re playing for $1.50 per deal, so we’d set the coin denomination to nickel stakes and wager the required 30 coins to begin the game.

Once you’ve pressed the “DEAL” button, the game will dispense your initial five card starting hand and place it on the bottom row of card space silhouettes. This process plays out exactly like it would in any other video poker game, so you’ll see something like this arranged on your game screen:

In this case, we’ve caught a fortunate deal and landed three of a kind right from the get go.

Super Draw 6 Card Poker uses a two way payout system, so whenever your initial five card starting hand contains a qualifying poker hand (anything ranked higher than one pair of Jacks or better in this case), you’ll immediately earn the requisite payout for that hand.

In our case, playing the Jacks or Better format of video poker, the pay table below is used to determine payouts on the initial five card hand:

For our sake, the three of a kind we’ve been dealt is good for a payout of 3 coins – which may not seem like all that much considering we wagered 30 coins (15 on the hand and 15 for the sixth card feature) to begin with.

That’s because these payout amounts are awarded on a per coin basis, so in reality you’re really being paid out 3 coins for every coin you risked on the initial five card hand. We risked 15 nickels ($0.75) to play the first five card hand, so we’d collect 45 nickels ($2.25) for landing three of a kind in this spot.

At this point, the game plays out just like any ordinary video poker hand would, so you’ll run through the usual hold and discard decisions. Depending on the five cards you’ve been dealt, your job is to select the best cards to hold onto, and which ones you’d like to replace during the drawing round.

In our case, the hand below offers a pretty straightforward scenario:

In this case, we’d click on the three 6s in the middle and hold those cards, while discarding the 4 of clubs and the King of diamonds. Once you’ve decided which cards to hold and which to discard, the game will duplicate your selected cards to cover the amount of hands (3, 5, or 10) you have in play:

Here, the “BLANK” spaces indicate where your replacement cards will be dealt to for each of the three hands we have in play. Notice the extra BLANK space to the far right hand side of screen, as this indicates where you’re sixth card will be dealt. You can use any five of the six cards dealt to each hand to form a complete five card poker hand, or in some special cases, all six cards will be used to form a stronger six card poker hand.

Keep in mind that a unique deck will be used to deal out each of the three (or more) hands on the screen. Thus, is you landed a fourth 6 (the 6 of clubs in this case) on the first hand in our example scenario, you could still land the same 6 of clubs from the second or third decks.

In our case, we’ve held the three 6s in the middle of our hand, so the next step is to click on the “DRAW” button to complete each of our three hands. Here’s what we were dealt out:

On the top hand, we’ve failed to improve at all, even when using the sixth card. This leaves us with three of a kind here.

On the middle hand, we found that 6 of clubs and improved to four of a kind.

On the bottom hand, we improved to a full house on the initial draw, before finding a third Jack to improve to a special six card hand: 2 three of a kinds.

We discussed this above, but that sixth card being dealt out can drastically change the dynamic of any hand. Here, we’ve made a special six card hand, one that can be found on the adjusted six card hand pay table shown below:

With the three completed hands now on your screen, the game is essentially over, and the only thing left to do is wait for the game to calculate your payouts. We’ll go through the payout math for each of our three hands below:

Remember, we started this hand by betting 30 coins – 15 to see the initial hand and 15 more to activate the sixth card option. That comes to $1.50, and when it was all said and done, our four hands (the first five card hand plus the three completed hands) produced a total payout of $53.25.

Not bad for a single play on the Super Draw 6 Card Poker video poker machine.

Now, you should be aware that an example hand like the one above is not indicative of how every hand will play out, or even most of them. Video poker is a hit and miss game, so you’ll experience the same sort of dry spells and run bad that every game offers.

With that said, Super Draw 6 Card Poker does offer a higher frequency of payouts, simply because you’ll have four hands to work with. When that pivotal sixth card is added to the mix, this game can become a steady stream of smaller – yet bankroll sustaining – payouts will you chase the big scores that come with premium hands.

Now that you know how to play Super Draw 6 Card Poker, it’s time to dive into the raw numbers that comprise the pay tables.

Remember that this machine actually houses seven individual video poker variants:

Each of these games includes slightly different rules, while prioritizing different hands by awarding higher payouts, so the pay table used in each game differs dramatically.

As experienced video poker players know, the pay table’s exact calibration, relative to the probabilities of forming each hand, determines the exact payback percentage for each format. Payback percentage is a crucial figure for all gamblers, because this number dictates how much you can expect to win or lose over the infinite long run.

Before we dive into the various payback percentages, let’s run through the seven pay tables you can expect to find on the Super Draw 6 Card Poker machine:

For the most part, the pay tables listed above conform closely to the industry standard. Unfortunately, players must contend with the customizable nature of video poker games, as casino operators are able to tweak their pay tables slightly to reduce or increase their own house edge.

This means you may sit down at a Super Draw 6 Card Poker machine in one casino and play using the pay tables found above, only to change venues and see the payouts adjusted in one way or another.

Because these adjustments can immediately affect the player’s bottom line – by reducing the game’s payback percentage and increasing the house’s edge – it’s vitally important to know your way around the pay table configurations.

See below for a game by game comparison of the pay tables you can expect to encounter in the game of Jacks or Better, both in major brick and mortar and online casinos:

As the numbers make clear, the optimal Jacks or Better pay table to play with is the standard “9 – 6” pay table – so named because of the respective 9 and 6 coin pays for making a full house and a flush. Using this pay table offers a payback percentage of 99.80 percent, which is essentially a breakeven proposition.

But when the pay table is adjusted even slightly, going from “9 – 6” to “9 – 5,” the payback percentage enjoyed by players suffers as a result, dropping to 98.68 percent. And each successive adjustment to the “9 – 6” standard results in an even more drastic drop.

We’ve compiled pay table comparisons for the other six variants found on Super Draw 6 Card Poker machine for your convenience:

Video poker strategy can be broken down into two basic levels: how to play your cards, and which games to play.

When it comes to playing your hands correctly – choosing which cards to hold and which to discard – every video poker variant offers different guidelines based on the game’s rules and pay tables. So we can’t really offer you a full fledged guide to hand playing strategy without diving into seven unique formats and four to five versions of the pay table.

Thankfully, renowned casino game analyst Michael Shackleford has created a dedicated video poker strategy section on his legendary Wizard of Odds page. There you’ll find a complete primer on video poker strategy broken down by variant and even by pay table.

In terms of game selection strategy, the data contained in the pay tables above provides all the information you’ll ever need. Simply put, the job of an informed player is to take your action to the most favorable games and pay tables only. Those with higher payback percentages, and thus lower house edges, will offer you more bang for your proverbial buck.

We’ve sifted through the data in the preceding sections to make things easy for you, so without further ado, we present the game selection guide for Super Draw 6 Card Poker:

By consulting this table, you can see that the best possible game and pay table to play on the Super Draw 6 Card Poker machine is Bonus Poker Deluxe using the 9 – 6 pay table.

This game and pay table combination creates the highest possible payback percentage of 99.84 percent, along with the lowest house edge of 0.16 percent.

Of course, as the pay table data in the preceding section shows, casino operators can adjust the pay tables to create even worse scenarios for the player. Thus, game selection strategy is your best bet – combined with playing your cards correctly – because you’ll always be able to steer clear of the worst bets and put your bankroll behind the most advantageous situations available.