How to Play Video Poker: Jacks or Better Rules, Pay Tables and Strategy

Video poker is five-card draw poker played alone against a machine. There is no dealer hand to beat and no other players: you are dealt five cards, choose which to keep, draw replacements once, and are paid according to the pay table on the screen. Because you decide which cards to hold, how you play changes the return, and because the pay table is printed on the screen, you can see before you bet which version of the game is the better one. This guide uses Jacks or Better, the standard version, to explain the rules, the pay tables, the odds of every hand and the simple strategy.

How to play video poker

1. Choose your stake. Most games let you bet 1 to 5 coins (or credits) per hand. Check the pay table for the royal flush: many pay more for it at the maximum bet.
2. Deal. You get five cards from a standard 52-card deck, shuffled for every hand.
3. Hold. Tap the cards you want to keep. You can hold all five, none, or anything in between.
4. Draw. The cards you did not hold are replaced from the same deck. There is only one draw.
5. Get paid. Your final hand is checked against the pay table. In Jacks or Better the lowest paying hand is a pair of jacks or better (jacks, queens, kings or aces); a pair of tens or lower pays nothing.

Jacks or Better pay table and odds

Hands rank as in normal poker. Payouts are per coin bet, and the chance is for a hand after the draw, played with the best strategy:

So 45.46% of hands pay something, but most of those are the 1-for-1 pair, which only returns the stake. The draw does a lot of the work: of all possible first five cards, only 20.6% already make a paying hand.

Why the pay table matters: 9/6 vs 8/5

Jacks or Better machines are named after what they pay for a full house and a flush. A “9/6” machine pays 9 and 6; an “8/5” pays 8 and 5. The rest of the table is usually identical, so those two numbers tell you the return:

Each point off the full house costs about 1.15% and each point off the flush about 1.10%, because each of those hands comes up roughly once in 90 hands. A 6/5 machine costs more than ten times as much as a 9/6 one for the same game and the same play. Online video poker shows the pay table on screen or in the help menu, so this is a check you can make before the first hand.

The royal flush and the bet size. Many games pay 250 per coin for a royal flush at 1 to 4 coins and 800 per coin at 5. Playing below the maximum on such a game costs roughly 1.4 percentage points of return, because cutting the royal from 800 to 250 removes about that much of the 99.54%. If the game pays the top royal at every bet size, this does not apply.

Jacks or Better strategy

The decision in video poker is which cards to hold. The simple strategy below, published by the Wizard of Odds (Michael Shackleford), returns 99.46% on a 9/6 machine, against 99.54% for perfect play. Look at every way you could play your hand, and choose the one that is highest on this list. A “high card” means a jack, queen, king or ace.

1. Four of a kind, straight flush, royal flush
2. 4 to a royal flush
3. Three of a kind, straight, flush, full house
4. 4 to a straight flush
5. Two pair
6. High pair (jacks or better)
7. 3 to a royal flush
8. 4 to a flush
9. Low pair (tens or lower)
10. 4 to an outside straight (open at both ends, such as 5-6-7-8)
11. 2 suited high cards
12. 3 to a straight flush
13. 2 unsuited high cards (if you have more than two, keep the lowest two)
14. Suited 10 with a jack, queen or king
15. One high card
16. Discard everything

Examples

Two habits from table poker cost money here: keeping a “kicker” next to a pair (draw three cards to the pair instead), and breaking a paying hand to chase a straight or flush when the list says otherwise.

Other video poker games

• Deuces Wild: all four 2s are wild, so the lowest paying hand is three of a kind and the pay table adds hands such as five of a kind and four deuces. It needs its own strategy; never discard a deuce. Our Deuces Wild guide has the pay tables and the full strategy.
• Bonus Poker and Double Double Bonus: four of a kind pays more depending on the rank (aces most), and Double Double Bonus adds extra for certain kickers. In Double Double Bonus two pair usually pays only 1 to fund those bonuses, so the game has bigger swings. Our bonus poker guide compares the pay tables and the strategy changes.
• Joker Poker: a 53-card deck with one joker as a wild card; the lowest paying hand is usually a pair of kings.
• Multi-hand video poker: your held cards are copied to 3, 5, 10, 50 or 100 hands, each drawn separately. Each hand is a separate bet, so a 100-hand game at one coin per hand is a 100-coin bet.

Video poker online

Online video poker is random-number-generator software, dealt from a freshly shuffled deck every hand. 22bet lists Jacks or Better from Habanero (1, 5, 10, 50 and 100-hand versions), Play’n GO, Pragmatic Play and Red Rake, Deuces Wild from Habanero, Betsoft, Play’n GO and Red Rake, Joker Poker, and Evolution’s First Person Video Poker. Pay tables differ between studios and versions, so open the pay table before you play and compare the full house and flush lines. For the hand ranking itself, see our poker hands guide; for how a return percentage works over a session, see our guide to RTP.

Play responsibly

Video poker is for players aged 18 and over. Even on a full-pay machine the return is below 100%, and a game deals several hands a minute, so the cost adds up quickly. Set a budget before you play and stop when it is spent.