This is an excellent book. It details the steps necessary to become an expert player, a professional player of Video Poker.

Optimal play is NOT perfect play. Mastering a trade is not easy. Discipline and practice are the watch words of all good Video Poker players.

"Video Poker-Optimum Play" by Dan Paymar is a first-rate tutorial/reference on how to play most of the common varieties of video poker. This book along with "Professional Video Poker" by Stanford Wong and the venerable "Winning Strategies for Video Poker" by Lenny Frome are the standard references on how to play video poker.

These solid video poker books make the points:
1) Some video poker games can be beaten.
2) Some video poker games are sucker bait.
3) Winning consistently requires informed play.
4) For every hand, there is only one "best play".
5) The best play is often different for different games.

Video poker has been called the crack cocaine of gambling simply because it is almost mesmerizing - fortune seems to be just one click away. The combination of frequent small payoffs, occasional medium size payoffs and the possibility of a big win - a Royal Flush - keeps most players riveted to the machines, feeding them more and more money in the hope of hitting that big one.

The interesting thing about video poker games is that you really can make money playing them... IF you know what you are doing and have a big enough bankroll to do it. Any of the standard video poker books can show you how. If you can, you should buy and read all three of them. They will all give you essentially the same information but sometimes it helps to see it in slightly different ways.

If you can only afford the time and money for one book, you might want consider "How to Gamble at The Casinos Without Getting Plucked Like a Chicken" by James Harrison Ford. In addition to telling you which video poker games to play and how to play them, it covers a variety of other casino games. Another possibility is to get one of the better video poker computer programs.

Just make sure that you do your homework before you start stuffing money into the video poker machines. It will save you money in the long run and make playing a lot more fun.

The book has really good information. The problem is that is painfully boring to slog through. I have noticed an improvement in my VP playing. I am playing longer and not losing as much still in search of that magical royal.

It took me over 2 weeks to get through this book and it is only 200 pages.

Having the discipline to play video poker correctly depends to a large extent on understanding the "Expected Value" of hands. There is no magic to this, it is pure mathematics. Yet, until reading Paymar's book, I never REALLY understood it, probably because I'm pretty much a mathematical idiot.

However, Paymar explains the concept in a clear, non-technical way while still conceding that NOBODY can play perfectly according to expected value. I went from just having blind faith in expected value to accepting it as fact.

He goes on to provide sound strategies for virtually every form of video poker.

I've been playing almost nothing but video poker in casinos for over a year (I've pretty much given up on slots) and, while I often came out ahead, I had never gotten a royal flush. A couple of months after reading this book, I hit one. Sure, luck was involved, but I credit this book with helping me maintain the discipline to play correctly.

As an avid and successful Video Poker player, and author of "Mastering Video Poker - a professional player's secrets revealed", I always like to take a look at the current state of video poker strategy guides. This book will teach you the basic whys and why nots of various plays. Lacking is any attention to the more advanced psychological aspects of training and playing, as well as how to truly take the casinos for all their worth in player perks, treatment, bonuses and general high-roller benefits.