Video Poker Strategy: The Paytable Decides Before You Do

Video poker is the only game on a casino floor that tells you its return before you play. Not in a help file, not in a regulator’s filing — on the paytable, in two numbers you can read in three seconds. And the same game, under the same name, can pay 99.54% or 95.00% depending on what those two numbers say.

That is the whole strategy. Everything else is detail.

The two numbers that set the return

Jacks or Better is the base game every other variant is built from. Its paytable lists what each hand pays per coin, and the two lines that move the return are the full house and the flush. Players name machines after them.

• 9/6 — full house pays 9, flush pays 6. Return with correct play: 99.54%. This is “full pay”.
• 8/5 — 97.30%.
• 7/5 — 96.15%.
• 6/5 — 95.00%.

Between the best and worst version of the identical game there is 4.5 percentage points. That is a wider spread than you will find across most slot catalogues, and it costs you nothing to check. Two glances at the paytable before the first hand.

The full-pay paytable, line by line

Here is what a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine pays, per coin wagered. Everything scales with the number of coins except the top line.

Read the full house and flush rows first, every time. If they say 8 and 5, you are giving away 2.24 percentage points before the first card is dealt. If they say 6 and 5, you are giving away 4.54.

Bet the maximum, or do not play

This is the rule that costs casual players the most money, and it is counter-intuitive.

Look again at the top line of that table. Every payout scales linearly with the number of coins — except the royal flush. At one to four coins the royal pays 250 per coin. At five coins it pays 800 per coin: 4,000 instead of 1,250.

That single jump is worth roughly 1.5 percentage points of return. Playing 9/6 Jacks or Better at one coin is a worse proposition than playing 8/5 at five. If the five-coin bet is more than you want to risk per hand, drop to a lower denomination and still bet five. Never play short coins on a full-pay machine.

Correct play is a decision table, not a feeling

Unlike slots, where the outcome is settled the moment you press spin, video poker asks you a real question: which cards to hold. There is exactly one mathematically best answer for every hand, and it has been solved.

The published 99.54% figure assumes you make that best choice every time. Typical casual play gives back 1.5% to 2% of it through hold mistakes — which is to say that a full-pay machine played carelessly returns about the same as a mediocre machine played well.

The three errors that account for most of the loss:

Holding a kicker with a pair. Keeping an ace alongside a pair of sevens feels prudent. It is not: it removes a draw card and lowers the expected value of the hand.

Breaking a made hand to chase. A flush is a flush. Discarding one card from it because four to a royal is showing is a decision that has to be earned with maths — and in most paytables, holding the flush wins.

Keeping three to a royal over a paying pair. Sometimes right, usually not. The royal is rare enough that its size does not compensate for the hands you throw away reaching for it.

If you take one habit from this article beyond reading the paytable, make it this: when a hand contains both a made paying hand and a draw to something bigger, the made hand usually wins. Chasing is where the 1.5% goes.

Variants change the maths, not the principle

Deuces Wild, Double Bonus, Bonus Poker and the rest rearrange the paytable and, with it, correct play. A hand you hold in Jacks or Better may be a discard in Deuces Wild. The published returns of the best-known full-pay versions:

The rule that survives every variant: find the return for that specific paytable, then learn the strategy for that paytable. Strategy is not transferable between variants, which is why “video poker strategy” as a single thing does not exist.

About those figures above 100%

Two lines in that table read as a return greater than what you put in, and that deserves an honest explanation rather than a wink.

They are real, and they are also close to useless. Three things stand between the number and your pocket. Those exact paytables have been withdrawn almost everywhere — an operator that priced a game at 100.76% was making a loss on it, and priced it differently the following year. The edge is a fraction of a percent, so realising it requires a volume of hands measured in hundreds of thousands, played without a single hold error. And the variance is brutal: much of that return sits in the royal flush, which arrives roughly once every 40,000 hands, so a bankroll that never sees one is simply losing the whole time.

The useful conclusion is not “hunt for 100%”. It is that the difference between paytables is real money, and the only free decision in the game is which machine you sit at.

What changes when you play online

The mechanics are identical — a shuffled 52-card deck, one draw, a fixed paytable — but three things move.

The paytable is one click away, not painted on the glass. It lives in the help or “info” screen. Open it before your first hand; if a site does not let you see it without depositing, that tells you something.

Bet size and denomination are separate controls. The max-coin rule still applies, so make sure the five-coin bet is selected and adjust the denomination if the total is too high, never the other way round.

Bonus weighting is usually hostile. Video poker’s low house edge is exactly why operators weight it at 10% or exclude it from wagering entirely. Clearing a bonus on video poker is normally a bad idea — see wagering requirements for how to check before you opt in.

The second pay table, the one nobody prints

Video poker is the game where the pay table decides everything: 9/6 versus 8/5 moves the return further than any decision you will make at the machine. Reading it before you sit down is the whole skill.

There is a second table that is never printed anywhere — the operator’s. Withdrawal limits, processing time, what happens to a big win, which clause gets applied. It sets your real return just as firmly as the first one, and you only get to read it after you have won.

On Keyhouse that second table does not exist, because there is no cashier: your balance stays in your own wallet and each hand settles as it ends. Find the 9/6 machine — then make sure the payout side is not 8/5.

What we hold, and what we will not print

We list Jacks or Better and Wild Texas, both from BGaming, and we publish no RTP for either. That is deliberate: in video poker the return is a property of the paytable the operator configures, not of the title. Printing one number for “Jacks or Better” would be printing a number we cannot stand behind at every casino that runs it.

It is the same reason we publish no return figure for craps, where the number depends on which bet you make rather than which game you open. Across our whole catalogue, 34 of 161 games carry a return we could verify, and we leave the field empty on the rest rather than repeat a figure we cannot check.

So the useful instruction is the one this whole article points at: open the game, read the full house and flush lines, and you will know your return before you stake anything. It is the one game where you do not have to take anyone’s word for it — not the casino’s, and not ours.

For how the same figure works in games where you cannot see the maths, see RTP, payout ratios and variance.

The casino still matters more than the game. Our crypto casino comparison verifies each operator’s licence in the regulator’s own register and publishes its unresolved-complaint count.

Set your limits before you deposit: see responsible gambling.

Return figures are the published mathematics of the paytables named, under optimal play, and can be verified against any video poker analyser. Catalogue counts measured on this site on 15 August 2026.