Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Video Poker: Our Review, How and Where to Play

The base game rules of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire Video Poker Live are quite simple and relatively similar to some casino poker tables. Every round progresses the same no matter which ruleset you choose, so we’ll start with the core game flow.

The game uses a single standard deck of 52 cards. To participate, you have to place a wager before the round begins. There is only one main betting option – you either pay the ante or not. However, you can choose to buy into multiple rounds at once. This ensures you won’t accidentally miss anything.

There’s also a special bonus bet you have to place to participate in the Millionaire Video Poker bonus. More on that later.

Millionaire Video Poker Live – Step-by-Step Guide

Once the round kicks off, the dealer starts by placing five cards face-up on the table. As always in poker-based games, your goal is to try and assemble as strong of a poker hand as possible. If you’re not sure how poker hands work and which ones exist, check out this guide before playing.

Once you get your first cards, you can choose to replace some of them, or ‘mulligan’ them. Simply use the interface to select which of the five cards you wish to keep. The cards you didn’t select will be replaced. Importantly, every player individually picks which cards they want to toss and which cards they want to keep. This was the tricky part to translate into a live game. For Millionaire Video Poker, however, Playtech found a simple solution.

Once you’ve selected cards to keep, the dealer will place 5 additional cards onto the table. These new cards replace the original cards directly below them, but only the ones you didn’t choose to keep.

For example, if you select all cards except the leftmost one in the first hand, only the leftmost card in the second hand counts for you. If you choose to toss away all the cards in the first hand, the, only the second round of cards counts for you.

Once this ends, the five cards that are active for you are checked for poker hands. If you’re not sure which cards are pertinent and which aren’t, the UI does a great job at highlighting the important parts.

If you have any poker hands that win in your chosen ruleset, you win as per the paytable.

Variants

As previously mentioned, the Who Wants to be a Millionaire Video Poker casino game offers several variants. The gameplay is unaffected no matter your choice. However, every variant has its own set of payouts and winning hands. This results in different volatility levels and slightly different RTP rates.

The available variants include:

• Jacks or Better Live – Arguably the most well-known variant of video poker, and the one we recommend for beginners. Requires at least a pair of Jacks to win and offers the highest RTP at 99.54% and easily manageable volatility.
• Deuces Wild Live – In this version, deuces (2 cards) act as ‘wilds’, which means they can substitute any other card. In practice, this means it’s much easier to win. However, the payouts are comparatively smaller as well. Requires at least three of a kind to win and offers 98.92% RTP.
• Double Double Bonus Poker Live – A highly volatile variant that boasts massive wins for powerful hands. Also features unique hands not found in standard poker rules. On the flip side, common wins like Two Pair or Straight pay very little. At 98.98% RTP, this option is suitable for risk-takers.
• Bonus Poker Live – Fairly similar to Double Double Bonus, but less volatile. It doesn’t include the same ‘kicker’ hands as Double Double, but has an overall better RTP at 99.17%.
• Millionaire Aces – A new variant of Video Poker created by Playtech specifically for Who Wants to be a Millionaire Video Poker Live. It offers enhanced payouts for Aces, while the rest of the paytable is similar to Jacks or Better. Also offers excellent RTP at 99.17%.

If you want to fully understand the subtle differences between these versions, check out the paytable below. It directly compares payouts for every type of hand.

To participate in the bonus round, you have to place a Bonus bet before the round begins. This wager always equals 5 times your main bet. If you don’t do so, you can still watch the special round, but you can’t win anything.

The special, themed bonus round is only triggered when certain conditions are met. Specifically, one of five special hands has to appear on the table. However, all 10 cards present on the table are used to make qualifying bonus hands. The type of qualifying hand determines the maximum payout for the round.

• Jack-Queen-King-Ace – 50x max payout
• Queen-Queen-King-Ace –  80x max payout
• Jack-Jack-King-Ace – 160x max payout
• Queen-Ace-Ace-Ace– 500x max payout
• Nine-King-Ace-Ace – 2,000x max payout

The round itself is a direct reference to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Essentially, you get four different hidden multipliers of varying value. You then pick A, B, C, or D. Each ‘answer’ corresponds to one of the multipliers. Your goal is to hopefully pick the highest one. You go through several such rounds and ultimately add up all of the multipliers you collected.

However, if you pick the X answer, the bonus round ends for you. Thankfully, you still collect any multipliers you collected beforehand. Also, the X doesn’t appear in lower questions with smaller multipliers.

Also, ‘lifelines’ may randomly trigger during some of the ‘questions’. These can trigger randomly. They’ll be familiar to fans of the show.

• 50:50 – removes the two smallest multipliers
• Ask the Audience – Displays a chart of the four answers, indicating the most popular one. Of course, this is determined by RNG, so it’s not always the right answer.
• Ask the Host – The lowest multipliers are removed.