Video Poker Strategy: Which Game to Actually Play

The Game Starts Before You Press Deal

Most casino visitors choose a video poker game the way they choose a restaurant: by what looks bright, what has a queue, or what someone recommended. That approach is not merely suboptimal, it is expensive, because the return figure is fixed by the paytable before any cards are dealt.

Two machines can both be labelled Jacks or Better and differ by 2.5 percentage points in theoretical return. Over a thousand pounds of play at one per cent per hand, that is 25 pounds. The entire difference is a row of numbers printed at the top of the screen, and it is the only part of the decision that matters.

So the first question is never "which game do I like" but "what does this specific paytable return under correct play". The second is that the return figure is only valid at maximum coins, and the third is that it is only valid if you hold the right cards. Get those three right and you are already playing one of the best games in the building. Get any of them wrong and you have handed the casino several times its normal edge.

It is also worth saying what video poker is not. It is not poker. There is no opponent, no position and no reading of anyone, and the only decision is which cards to hold from a deal. The skill is entirely paytable arithmetic, and it takes a few weeks of deliberate practice to acquire. For contrast, the decision side of poker betting markets is a different discipline altogether.

Ranked: The Jacks or Better Family

This is the single most useful table in the article, because Jacks or Better is the most widely mispriced game on the floor. The shorthand refers to the full house and flush payouts, and those two numbers move the return more than anything else in the paytable.

The figures below assume five-credit play and optimal strategy. A simple strategy, the kind most people can actually remember, costs about 0.08 percentage points on 9/6, so the gap between "played well" and "played perfectly" is tiny on this particular game and large on others.

The important row is the second one. 9/5 is not a slightly worse 9/6, it is a different game with a different strategy, and players who switch machines without switching charts lose roughly 0.3 per cent, which is most of the difference between the two games. The drop from 9/6 to 8/5 is nearly two and a half points, and no amount of careful strategy on an 8/5 machine recovers what the paytable already took.

Our slots RTP guide explains the arithmetic behind these figures, and the key point is that return to player is a long-run average over an enormous number of hands, not a prediction about your session.

Jacks or Better Paytables and Real Returns

All figures are theoretical returns under optimal strategy at five credits per hand.

Nine-Six Versus Nine-Five Versus Eight-Five

Let me be blunt about the comparison, because casinos present these as a choice and they are not comparable choices at all.

9/6 at 99.54 per cent is the game you want. With optimal play it gives back 99.54 pence in every pound, so the long-run edge for the casino is 0.46 per cent. On a simple-strategy approximation the return is around 99.46, which for a 2.00 bet is a difference of 1.6 pence per hand. Almost nobody can tell the difference between perfect and near-perfect play on this game, and that is precisely why it is such a good game for beginners: you can be sloppy for very little money.

9/5 at 98.45 per cent looks like a minor variation and is not. The flush pays 5 instead of 6, which costs 1.09 points of return. It also changes strategy: four-card flushes and certain straight draws lose value relative to a pair, so a 9/6 chart tells you to hold cards on this machine that are worth discarding. Switching machines without switching charts is the most common expensive mistake I see among players who believe they know the game.

8/5 at 97.30 per cent is over two points worse than 9/6. Both the full house and the flush have been cut, and these are the two most frequently occurring paying hands in the game, so the damage compounds. At 97.30 the house edge is 2.70 per cent, which is a typical slots edge. You have been moved from the best game on the floor to a middling one, while still believing you are playing a game of skill.

To put it in money terms at 2.00 per hand and 400 hands per hour, 9/6 costs you about 3.68 an hour in theory, 9/5 costs 12.40, and 8/5 costs 21.60. The game is identical and the screens look similar. That is the whole lesson of this section, and it is worth remembering next time a promotion quotes a return figure for one specific game. Wagering conditions usually push video poker into a low contribution tier, and our casino bonuses guide covers how that works.

How to Read a Paytable in Ten Seconds

Before you play anything, look for these four numbers in this order.

• The flush payout, second row from the bottom of the paying hands. Six is the target. Five is the warning sign that you have left full-pay territory.
• The full house payout. Nine is the target. Eight is where most of the floor sits and it costs a full point of return.
• The royal pays 800 times the bet, or 800 only at one coin. A royal paying 4,000 at five credits but 800 at one credit is the correct structure. If the top line shows 800 and 1,600, 2,500, 3,000 and 4,000 across the coin levels, the game is full pay. If the top line shows 800 flat at every level, the game is short pay and you should walk away.
• The maximum coin button position. Video poker must be played at maximum coins or the royal bonus is not released. This is the setting players most often get wrong, usually once, in their first ten minutes on a machine.

Why Full-Pay Jacks or Better Should Be Your Default

Here is my argument, and it comes down to one number.

A correctly played 9/6 Jacks or Better has a 0.46 per cent house edge. That makes it one of the three or four best games in a casino, behind only blackjack with a good rule set and a handful of table games with genuinely favourable rules. I have seen it written many times that video poker is "a game of skill" and that therefore it is not gambling, which is nonsense: it is a gambling game with a very small edge, and a small edge is what makes it playable for a long time without going broke.

The second reason to default to it is strategy cost. On Jacks or Better the difference between optimal play and reasonable play is under 0.1 percentage points. On most bonus games the difference between optimal and reasonable play is several points, because the bonuses change which hands are worth keeping. A 99.17 per cent game played with a Jacks or Better chart drops to roughly 98.7. That is a penalty most players will not notice and most experts will not think to mention.

The third reason is variance. 9/6 is a flat game in the mathematical sense: it pays small amounts often. A two-hour session at 9/6 will typically land within a few pounds of expectation, which means the bankroll question answers itself. The same bankroll on a bonus game can be wiped out by a run of bad hands while the theoretical return is perfectly respectable. If you are new, if your session budget is small, or if you intend to play with money that matters, flatness is the feature you want.

There is an honest caveat. Full-pay 9/6 has become harder to find. Land-based casinos have moved the good paytables into high-limit areas and phone-only products, and a lot of what remains on the floor is 8/5. That is a deliberate commercial decision and it is not in the interest of the players. Our casino app comparison is where the full paytables still exist, and if you want to know which operators are still offering them, that is where to look.

Short-Pay Games Cannot Be Fixed With Strategy

Some machines pay 800 for a royal at every coin level. Others pay 800, 1,200, 1,600, 1,800 and 2,000, or 800 flat. These are short pay games, and the difference between them is enormous.

On a short pay game the royal is worth roughly half what it is worth at full pay, and the royal is the only hand that matters to the return figure. Perfect strategy cannot compensate, because the shortfall is not a strategy error, it is a paytable that pays less. A player using optimal strategy on a short pay 9/6 Jacks or Better returns around 97 per cent rather than 99.54. The strategy is already doing everything it can; the machine simply keeps more.

This is the same principle that makes low-volatility slots with a 95 per cent return a bad choice, and it is why a player who insists on "the game with the best strategy" is still choosing badly. Strategy operates on the gap between what the paytable offers and what a good player can extract. Narrow that offer and the gap shrinks with it. Our blackjack basic strategy guide covers the same principle in a game where the rules themselves, rather than the paytable, set the ceiling.

The one situation where a short pay game is defensible is a full-pay Deuces Wild or a heavily discounted progressive on a short-pay base. Jackpot games and progressives are a separate calculation entirely, covered in our progressive jackpot guide, and they should not be assessed on base return at all. If you are chasing a big number, the mathematics that actually applies is in our roulette wheel physics piece, which covers the same variance-versus-return argument from a different angle.

Optimal Play Rules by Game Type

You do not need a full strategy chart to play well. You need a short decision list, and the right list depends on the family.

Bonus Games: When a Higher Number Is a Trap

Double Double Bonus is the game that breaks people, so it deserves its own warning rather than a straight recommendation.

It pays 4,000 for four aces with a kicker, 2,000 for four twos, threes or fours with a kicker, 1,600 for any other four of a kind, and 800 for a five of a kind. The full-pay version returns 98.98 per cent, which sounds worse than 99.17 for Bonus Poker and much worse than 99.54 for Jacks or Better. That is the point: it is a worse average game with a wildly different variance profile.

In DDB the average hand is very often a loss. Around a quarter of hands return nothing, because the strategy is to hold three of a kind or a pair and give up all the cards, which fails to improve more often than it succeeds. The return is concentrated in a small number of hands, particularly the kicker bonuses, which occur roughly once every few thousand hands. You will lose for an hour, think the game is rigged, then hit a quads with a kicker and recover several sessions of losses in one deal. That swing is not exciting in the way a casino wants you to think; it is uncomfortable in the way that makes people chase.

Compare that with 9/6 Jacks or Better, where you win something on roughly 43 per cent of hands and the distribution is smooth. For a player with a 200 bankroll, one hour at 1.00 per hand and 400 hands is 400 of action. Under DDB, a bad run of that length losing more than 200 is entirely ordinary, and the return will recover over thousands more hands. The question is whether you will still be playing then.

My rule is straightforward. Play 9/6 Jacks or Better as your main game. Treat DDB as an occasional session on a bankroll you can afford to lose entirely, and never with money earmarked for something else. If you want the mechanics of a genuinely high-return game with wild cards, full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.76 per cent and is the actual best game on the floor when it is available at full pay. The wider picture of which game deserves your money is in our casino table games guide.

What to Do on Your Next Visit

Walk the floor and look only at the full house and flush numbers. Find a 9/6 Jacks or Better, put in maximum coins, and learn the short decision list above. If the room has none, play 8/5 Bonus Poker with a Bonus Poker chart rather than a Jacks or Better one, and leave anything 8/5 Jacks or Better or worse alone.

Frequently Asked Questions