Mafia Poker Walk Through

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The Mafia Poker Event was released and then pulled for about 2 hours (1). It is now out for everyone but they didn't bother to reset the timer.

To start, click the "Play Poker" button from the banner. Clicking on the "How To Play" help mark will open the in game directions. They seem pretty elaborate but most will find this event fun and easy. For this post, I'll break down each of the directions.

If you already know the basics of poker, these directions won't be necessary. To better understand them, a glossary of term is provided on the top of the instructions.

In a nutshell, Juliana is the dealer and you want to beat her. Whoever has the best poker hand out of 5 cards wins. Each new game will use 52 cards and the cards that you are drawn count against your card pool (not the entire deck). For each game, you can discard and draw as many cards as you like and you will be able to see 2 cards from the dealers hand.

Hand ranks are shown below. In the event of a tie, the winner is determined by who has the next highest card. Because this is a basic version of 5 Card Draw and the dealer doesn't draw any new cards, Ace High and King High are viable hands and should not be ignored in your strategy.

You can't play Mafia Poker until you have cards. Poker Cards are only available through the free gift system and the Marketplace. The Poker Card can be found on the Free Gift Page

Bookmark the link below and you can use it to send Poker Cards to your mafia. The more you send, the more you will get in return.

http://spockon.me/MWLLPokerCard

If you really want a boatload of Poker Cards, use the Gift Blaster by Team Spockholm.

Once you have a ZMC full of Poker Cards, accept as many as you like. The good news is there are no limits other than the 250 daily Free Gift Limit. Don't forget to accept the other gifts you need like Artillery Shells before going balls out on accepting these.

Of Course Poker Cards can be purchased from the Marketplace. You can buy them at the bottom of the Mafia Poker Page in increments of 5,10, 25 or 50 at the cost of 1 Reward Point each.

You can also get them from the Marketplace under the Playing Cards Tab. Yesterday Zynga changed this tab from Collectable Cards (1). I thought they were changing the name of Collectable Cards to Playing Cards but now this change makes more sense.

You will now find Collectable Cards and Poker Cards under this tab. I don't know how Collectable Cards can be considered Playing Cards because you can't play anything with them.

Now that you have Poker Cards, you can play Mafia Poker. With each game you and the dealer will be given 5 cards and two of the dealers will be exposed. In the example below, Juliana has a Queen so I assume I need to beat a pair of Queens.

I will keep my Kh and Ah and discard the remaining 3 cards. To do this click on the red X of the "Discard" button. Once you click on the "Discard" button, it will turn into a "Keep" button and you have the ability to change things back. In the example below, I wanted to keep the King but accidentally clicked "Discard".

Clicking on the "Keep" button will bring the Kh back to my hand. Zynga should reverse these buttons because players are going to get confused and do the opposite of the action they intended. If you are going to play the card, the "Discard" button will appear and if you are going to discard it the "Keep" button will appear. You may lose a few good cards until you get the hang of it.

When you have your hand set up the way you want, click on the "Draw" button located under the unused portion of the deck to get cards which will replace your discarded ones. There are two counters on your deck of cards. The first number indicates how many cards are remaining in the deck. The maximum this number can be is 42 because you have 5 cards and so does the dealer. The second number in parenthesis is how many cards you have collected over the number of cards (including the ones not played in the deck).  In the example below, I should have 92 cards in my inventory. I don't know why they bothered with this. I'd rather know how many cards I have in my inventory and not have to calculate it.

Once you click "Draw" you will be dealt the number of cards that you discarded. If none of the new cards improve your hand, you can repeat the process. As mentioned earlier, Ace High is not a bad hand in 5 Card Draw. If I weren't writing this post, I would probably use the hand below.

This time I discarded the 8s and the 2c and my hand still didn't improve. I kept the 9h because I know have a flush possibility and 3 high cards.

I got the a fifth heart on the next draw so I'm confident I have the best hand. To end the hand, click on the "Show" button above your hand.

The dealers hand will now be exposed and the results will be displayed in the middle. Juliana had a pair of 7's so it's a good thing I didn't play the Ace High. I had to draw 6 cards so strategically this was still not the best option. I would have only lost 5 cards and our goal is to conserve cards since we are limited to 250 a day. 250 a day may seem like a lot but we need to win 150 hands in 7 days to get Emerald mastery. Assume you blow off your Family Property (which isn't cool), the most cards you can get for the event is 1,750. You use 5 cards per hand so that comes out to 350 hands. You need to have a win rate of at least 42% to make it and that doesn't count any additional cards you draw per hand. This one may be hard to master if you don't conserve your cards.

If you lose a hand, it says "Hard Luck!". You will lose quite a few hands and there isn't much you can do about it.

You don't need to be a hero. If you are dealt a decent hand, don't waste Poker Cards to improve it. In the example below I was dealt 3 Queens so thee was no need to discard the 3S and the 4S. I just went right to directly to the "Show" button and won the hand.

You can spend 1 Reward Point to see the dealers card but that would be silly. Zynga sure goes out of their way to come up with ways to spend Reward Points!

John Lloyd got a Royal Flush which is the best hand you can possibly get in poker. He was nice enough to post it on our fan page.

When you win a hand, your number of wins number will increase by one.

Once you win the number of hands to get to the next level, you will get a star on your game mastery tracker.

The number of hands you need to win to get to each level of mastery are shown below.

Mastery	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Ruby	Emerald
Hands Won	10	25	60	100	150

When you reach each level of mastery, you will get a loot reward. The Fortune Teller was added to the inventory yesterday and now we know what she is for.

You can generate spam for the sole purpose of bragging to your mafia but I don't recommend this. Clicking on these posts only brings one to the Mafia Wars Home Page.

The stats of your Fortune Teller will increase as you gain the next level of mastery.

Let's take a closer look at this Fortune Teller. I saw some comments on the fan page about her hands. Wow they are quite large. Leave it to Zynga to take an otherwise beautiful girl and turn her into a freak show. 

I was just raving about what a great job the Art Team does (1). Maybe the person who added those hands is a fan of Seinfeld and it was done intentionally. They made an edit of Jimmy Lechons fingers so maybe they could give this girl some prettier hands (1).

Thanks to Mike Nestor and John Lloyd for helping with this post and providing some of the math.

Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law