Video Poker: Rules, Odds and How to Play

Video poker is five-card draw played against a paytable. You bet, the machine deals five cards from a virtual 52-card deck, you keep the ones you want, and the discards are replaced. Whatever hand you finish with is paid at the rate printed on the screen. There is no dealer to beat and nobody else at the table — in the standard game, a pair of jacks or better is the lowest hand that pays anything.

Two things set the return: the paytable on that particular machine, and how well you play the draw. A full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better machine returns 99.54% with correct play, which is one of the lowest costs in any casino. The same game with a trimmed paytable returns closer to 97%. Same screen, same cards, roughly six times the cost per hand.

This guide covers the rules, the hand probabilities, how to read a paytable, a hold order a beginner can memorise, and what an hour actually costs. If you want the wider casino picture first, start with the complete casino betting guide.

Video poker rules: how one hand works

Every video poker game — Jacks or Better, Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild — runs the same four steps.

1. Choose your denomination and bet size. Bets are counted in "coins", usually one to five per hand. A five-coin bet at 25 cents is $1.25. 2. Press DEAL. The machine shuffles a virtual 52-card deck and shows you five cards. 3. Hold the cards you want. Tap or press the button under each card. Anything you do not hold is discarded. 4. Press DRAW. Replacement cards come from the same deck, drawn from the 47 cards you have not seen. The final five-card hand is paid against the paytable, and the hand ends.

That is the whole game. A few things it deliberately does not do:

• There is no bluffing and no opponent. Your hand is compared to a fixed pay schedule, not to anyone else's cards.
• There is no second draw. One deal, one draw, done.
• Hands do not carry over. Each deal is an independent shuffle, so a cold streak does not make the next hand more likely to pay.
• Suits never rank against each other. A spade flush and a club flush pay identically.

The single rule most beginners get wrong is the bet size. Almost every machine pays a bonus on the royal flush only at five coins — 800 per coin instead of 250. Betting fewer coins is not a smaller version of the same game; it is a materially worse one. If five coins is uncomfortable at your denomination, drop to a lower denomination and keep betting five.

Which hands pay, and how often each one lands

Hand rankings are standard poker rankings, with one cut-off: anything below a pair of jacks pays nothing in the base game. Two nines is a losing hand.

The table below is a full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better machine, showing what each hand pays per coin, how often it appears when you play the draw correctly, and how much of the total return it supplies.

Hand frequencies are the published optimal-play figures for 9/6 Jacks or Better (Wizard of Odds); the share-of-return column is our own multiplication of payout by frequency. Columns total 99.54%.

Three things fall out of that table.

• You lose the hand about 55% of the time. Roughly 45 hands in 100 pay something, and the single most common payout is a jacks-or-better pair that just returns your bet.
• The small hands carry the game. Three of a kind, two pair and high pairs supply almost 70% of the total return between them. The big hands are decoration on top.
• The royal is worth about 2% of return all by itself. Strip it out and the same machine returns roughly 97.6% — which is what your results will look like across any session short of about 40,000 hands.

How to read a video poker paytable

The paytable is the game's price tag, and unlike a slot machine it is printed on the screen before you bet. Video poker machines are named after two rows: the full house and the flush payouts per coin. A "9/6" machine pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush. An "8/5" machine pays 8 and 5. Everything else on a Jacks or Better paytable is usually identical.

If you want the math: a full house shows up on about 1.151% of hands. Cutting its payout from 9 coins to 8 costs you one coin on a five-coin bet — that is 1/5 of a bet, or 0.2 bets... no: on a five-coin bet, a full house paying 45 instead of 40 is a difference of 5 coins, exactly one full bet. So the return falls by the frequency itself, about 1.15 percentage points. The flush appears on 1.101% of hands, so a coin off that row costs about 1.10 points. That is the whole arithmetic of paytable shopping.

9/6 is the published full-pay figure; the rows below it are our own subtraction using the ~1.1-point-per-coin rule above, and land within about a tenth of a point of published full-strategy analyses.

Before you put money in, check four rows:

• Full house and flush. The two numbers that name the machine.
• Royal flush at max coins. It should read 4,000 for five coins, not 1,250.
• Four of a kind. 25 per coin in plain Jacks or Better. Games that pay more here have taken it from somewhere else.
• The lowest paying hand. "Jacks or Better" versus "Kings or Better" is a large difference in how often you win anything.

Our paytable breakdown goes row by row on the variants where the trade-offs are less obvious.

Which cards to hold and which to throw away

Correct play is not obvious and it is not intuitive, which is why the return figures come with the words "with correct play" attached. Guessing costs a beginner somewhere between one and three percentage points — enough to turn the best machine on the floor into a mediocre one.

Here is a simplified hold order for Jacks or Better. Read the list from the top and hold the first thing your five cards contain.

1. Made royal flush, straight flush, or four of a kind 2. Four cards to a royal flush 3. Full house, flush, or straight 4. Three of a kind 5. Four cards to a straight flush 6. Two pair 7. High pair (jacks, queens, kings or aces) 8. Three cards to a royal flush 9. Four cards to a flush 10. Low pair (twos through tens) 11. Four cards to an open-ended straight 12. Two suited high cards 13. Three cards to a straight flush 14. Two unsuited high cards (keep the two lowest) 15. One high card 16. Nothing — discard all five

Three entries on that ladder feel wrong the first time and are worth stating plainly:

• Break a made flush or a made straight for four to a royal. The royal draw is worth roughly three times the six-coin flush. Do not break a straight flush for it, and note that a full house or four of a kind can never contain four to a royal.
• A low pair beats two unsuited high cards. The pair draws to trips, a full house and quads; two high cards mostly draw to a pair that returns your bet.
• Never hold a kicker. With three of a kind or four of a kind, discard everything else. An ace alongside your trip sevens does nothing except block an improvement.

This simplified ladder gives up a fraction of a percentage point against computer-perfect play. For most players that gap is smaller than the gap between a 9/6 machine and an 8/5 one, so paytable choice comes first. We measured the exact cost of playing simply in video poker strategy: how close simple play gets you.

Which video poker variant should you play?

Every variant is the same five-card draw with a rearranged paytable. Bonus games pay extra for specific quads and take it back from the small hands; wild-card games add wilds and raise the minimum paying hand.

Figures are the best-known full-pay version of each game with optimal strategy. [CITATION NEEDED — verify each full-pay return against current published paytable analysis before publish.] Reduced paytables of the same games run several points lower, and the returns above 100% assume perfect play on machines that are rare and usually high-limit.

Two practical points. First, the returns above 100% are real but not free money — they require exact play on a specific paytable, and one mis-held hand per session erases the theoretical edge. Second, the bonus and wild variants pay out in fewer, larger chunks. Double Double Bonus and Deuces Wild both cut the frequent small wins to fund the quads, so the same bankroll swings much harder. A beginner learning on 9/6 Jacks or Better gets the gentlest variance and the simplest strategy.

What an hour of video poker costs

Take the 99.54% machine at quarters, betting five coins: $1.25 per hand. A steady pace is around 600 hands per hour, so you put through $750 an hour. The house edge is 0.46%, which makes the expected cost about $3.45 per hour.

Now run the same hour on the 8/5 version of the identical game. The edge is 2.71%, so the expected cost is about $20.30 per hour — roughly six times more for a screen that looks the same from three feet away.

Expected cost is not the same as what you will actually see, and video poker's distribution is lopsided:

• The royal flush lands about once per 40,000 hands. At 600 hands an hour, that is around 67 hours of play between royals on average.
• Without it, the machine returns about 97.6%. Most sessions are played on that number, not on 99.54%.
• Four of a kind is your real "big" hand. It arrives roughly once every 400 hands and pays 125 coins on a five-coin bet.

So bankroll for the drought. A session roll that only survives at the average return will not survive a normal 2,000-hand stretch with no quads. If the pace or the swings start dictating your bets rather than the paytable, the responsible gambling guide covers the warning signs and the tools that shut it down.

Beginner mistakes that quietly cost you money

None of these are dramatic. They just leak return on every hand.

• Betting fewer than five coins. Losing the royal bonus costs about 1.4 percentage points — more than the entire house edge on a 9/6 machine. Drop the denomination instead.
• Sitting at whatever machine is free. Paytables differ inside the same casino, on the same bank of machines, in the same lobby. Check the full house and flush rows first, every time.
• Holding a kicker with trips or quads. It removes a draw card and adds nothing.
• Keeping three cards to a flush or straight. Neither is on the hold ladder. A low pair, and often even a single high card, is worth more.
• Chasing the royal with a lone ten. A single ten is not on the ladder at all. Suited ten-plus-high-card is, and only near the bottom.
• Trusting the AUTOHOLD button. It plays a rules-based approximation, not optimal strategy, and on some games it is noticeably wrong. Use it to learn, not to play.
• Treating a cold machine as "due". Every deal is a fresh shuffle. Streaks are variance, not a pattern to read.

What changes when you play video poker online

The core game does not change. An online video poker title deals from a shuffled 52-card deck using a random number generator, pays the paytable on the screen, and settles hand by hand. Licensed operators run those generators through independent testing, and the paytable is visible before you stake anything — which is the main reason video poker is easier to price than online slots, where the return is usually not published on the game screen.

What does change is the environment around the hand.

• Speed. Nobody is waiting behind you and there is no walk to the cashier. Online play can run well past 600 hands an hour, and cost scales directly with hands played.
• Paytable variety. Online lobbies often carry several versions of the same title. The full-pay version and a reduced one can sit side by side with identical artwork.
• Multi-hand formats. Playing 3, 10, 50 or 100 hands from one held combination multiplies your total stake by the number of hands. The return per hand is unchanged; the swings are not.
• Practice mode. Most lobbies let you play the same title for fake money. Use it to drill the hold ladder until the counter-intuitive holds are automatic.
• Bonus terms. Video poker is frequently excluded from bonus wagering or counted at a low percentage, precisely because its return is high. Read the game weighting before assuming a bonus applies — our breakdown of what you actually keep after wagering explains how that arithmetic works.

Video poker sits inside the wider poker family, and the skills only partly overlap: no reading opponents, no betting rounds, just a draw priced against a fixed schedule. For the table version, see our casino poker guide.