Most books on poker and most good players will tell you to keep the kicker because the hand cloaking is worth the hit in odds.
Not true, no matter how big you make the font. 
Well, certainly not true in Nevada, at least, and most likely anywhere else as well. All regulated video poker machines in Nevada (that is, all of them), deal from a standard 52-card deck (except, of course, those that include jokers). In New Jersey, at least of a few years ago, some video poker machines were classified as ‘slot machines’, in which case, your claim may or may not be correct. But a blanket statement that video poker does not deal from a standard 52-card deck is just wrong. Virtually any v.p. machine you come across in a legal establishment does in fact use 52-cards.
It all depends. Naturally, the chihuahua is a better bluffer than the bulldog.
I sit corrected, Nevada and Louisiana. New Jersey has regulations concerning the dealing of the next card.
Is that why the payout can be adjusted from 74% to 89%?:rolleyes:
Yes. Why the roll-eyes? If I want to hold a little more money, I’ll just pay 7 for a full house instead of 8. You can adjust the payouts for the various hands in many different ways to set up exactly the amount of variance and advantage you want.
Video Poker does deal from a deck of 52; the drawn cards are always from the remaining 47 in the deck in a completely random fashion, in all jurisdictions.
In some jurisdictions, the order of the cards to be drawn is not allowed to be finalized until the player has made his discards. So the machine continues to shuffle the remaining 47 cards in the deck, in a virtual sense, until that “draw” button is pressed.
In New Jersey, the only regulation applicable to this discussion classifies Video Poker as “skill-influenced” and arbitrarily adjusts the legal required hold percentage two points from optimal to recognize human fallibility of skill. For example, if the required payback percentage for a “slot machine” (I don’t have a reference to the real numbers right now) were a minimum 83%, then any acceptable variation of Video Poker would be required to have an optimal-play payout of 85% to be accepted there.
Some jurisdictions perform their own gaming machine testing and certification, and others rely on a few selected “labs” to certify gaming devices for them. Many, perhaps most, and maybe all of the regulations from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, which cover every conveivable aspect of the behavior of any gaming device, may be utterly contradictory.
And the payouts are adjusted solely by manipulating the pay tables, and calculating optimal play based on those pays. “Deuces Wild” video poker gets you even money on three of a kind, while standard video poker pays even money on a pair of jacks, 2-for-1 on two pair, and 3-1 on three of a kind.
On some video poker machines, combinations are set in such a way that it’s very difficult to play mathematically optimally - they have an optimal-play payback of greater than 100%.
Lastly, because Video Poker is entirely a solitary pursuit, you don’t have to worry that keeping a kicker card if dealt a pair is going to bluff your “opponent”. The previous sentence is an attempt to bring my furtherence of the Video Poker hijack into some relevancy with the OP 
AmbushBug
[sub]this is the field of my expertise[/sub]
I was refering to the internal payout adjustment for the machine.
(Note: the percentages given was for older “Cherry Masters” and not representative of all videos.)