Games · Video Poker
Video Poker: the machine that grades your play
The best-paying machine in the casino — if you play it right, and the machine tells you whether you did. Jacks or Better 9/6 returns 99.54% with perfect play, and full-pay Deuces Wild actually returns over 100% — numbers this site doesn't quote from anywhere: our engine enumerates every possible deal and every possible hold to derive them. Deal a hand, pick your holds, and the same solver grades your decision against the mathematically best one.
Choose a paytable and deal.
Free game, fun credits only — no real money. Verdicts come from the exact solver: every possible hold of your dealt hand is priced and yours is compared with the best one.
Every hand below is played perfectly — the solver prices all 32 holds and takes the best. The chart shows the observed return finding its way to the exact figure (for Jacks or Better 9/6: 99.5439%, computed by full enumeration, not quoted).
Descriptive, not predictive: with a seeded shuffle the same seed always reproduces this exact run. The wiggle early on is variance doing what variance does — the royal alone is worth about 2% of total return and arrives roughly once per 40,000 hands, which is why short sessions sit below the line more often than above it.
Twelve real schedules, priced exactly. Each family leads with its full-pay version — the optimal one you'll basically never find on a floor — followed by the ladder casinos actually stock. Every return below is our own enumeration of all 2,598,960 deals × 32 holds; the published figures were reproduced before any of it was published here.
Jacks or Better
Jacks or Better (9/6 full-pay) — the benchmark schedule
| Hand | 1 coin | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush ★ | 250 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 125 |
| Full house | 9 | 45 |
| Flush | 6 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 15 |
| Two pair | 2 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 5 |
| Version | What the glass changed | Return | Costs you* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 full-pay | — the benchmark | 99.54% | — |
| 9/5 | Flush 6→5 | 98.45% | $6.84/hr |
| 8/6 | Full house 9→8 | 98.39% | $7.20/hr |
| 8/5 | Full house 9→8 · Flush 6→5 | 97.30% | $14.03/hr |
| 7/5 | Full house 9→7 · Flush 6→5 | 96.15% | $21.23/hr |
| 6/5 | Full house 9→6 · Flush 6→5 | 95.00% | $28.42/hr |
Only two numbers move down the ladder — what a full house and a flush pay — and they quietly take 4.5% of your money between the top rung and the bottom.
Bonus Poker
Bonus Poker (8/5 full-pay) — the benchmark schedule
| Hand | 1 coin | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush ★ | 250 | 4000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 125 |
| Full house | 8 | 40 |
| Flush | 5 | 25 |
| Straight | 4 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 15 |
| Two pair | 2 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 5 |
Four of a kind splits by rank on every rung: aces 80/coin, 2s–4s 40/coin, 5s–Ks 25/coin.
| Version | What the glass changed | Return | Costs you* |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8/5 full-pay | — the benchmark | 99.17% | — |
| 7/5 | Full house 8→7 | 98.01% | $7.20/hr |
| 6/5 | Full house 8→6 | 96.87% | $14.36/hr |
The 80-per-coin four aces stay on every rung; the full house payout is what erodes. The aces are the advertisement — the full house is the price.
Deuces Wild
Deuces Wild (full-pay) — the benchmark schedule
| Hand | 1 coin | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush ★ | 250 | 4000 |
| Four deuces | 200 | 1000 |
| Wild royal flush | 25 | 125 |
| Five of a kind | 15 | 75 |
| Straight flush | 9 | 45 |
| Four of a kind | 5 | 25 |
| Full house | 3 | 15 |
| Flush | 2 | 10 |
| Straight | 2 | 10 |
| Three of a kind | 1 | 5 |
| Version | What the glass changed | Return | Costs you* |
|---|---|---|---|
| full-pay | — the benchmark | 100.76% player edge | — |
| "Not So Ugly" 25/16/10 | Five of a kind 15→16 · Straight flush 9→10 · Four of a kind 5→4 · Full house 3→4 · Flush 2→3 | 99.73% | $6.46/hr |
| "Illinois/Airport" 25/15/10 | Four of a kind 5→4 · Full house 3→4 · Flush 2→3 | 98.91% | $11.56/hr |
The wild-card game reshuffles half the schedule between versions, which makes the glass genuinely hard to read — the ladder below does the reading.
★ The royal flush pays 250 per coin at 1–4 coins but 800 per coin at 5, on every schedule here — betting short of max is voluntarily playing a worse machine. All returns assume max bet and perfect play.
*Cost per hour is the return gap versus the family's full-pay schedule at 500 hands/hour of quarter max-bet play ($625/hr of coin-in) — an expected-value figure, not a prediction for any session. And "perfect play" is load-bearing: most players give back another 2–4% in wrong holds on top of whatever the glass takes. The Play tab's strategy verdicts show you exactly what each hold costs.
How this simulation works
- Rules modeled
- Standard draw video poker, single 52-card deck per hand. Five cards dealt; hold any subset; discards are replaced from the remaining 47 cards; the final five-card hand pays per the machine's schedule. Twelve schedules are modeled across three families: the Jacks or Better ladder from full-pay 9/6 down to the 6/5 found on cruise ships and airport floors; Bonus Poker 8/5, 7/5 and 6/5 (quad payouts split 80/40/25 by rank on every rung); and Deuces Wild full-pay, 'Not So Ugly', and Illinois/Airport (all four 2s wild, nothing below three of a kind pays). All pricing is at max bet (5 coins), where the natural royal pays 800 per coin instead of 250. Stakes are fun credits in integer cents.
- Assumptions
- Hands are independent (a freshly shuffled deck each deal). 'Perfect play' means the EV-maximizing hold among all 32 subsets, priced exactly over every possible draw. Max-bet basis throughout — betting fewer than 5 coins strictly lowers the return via the royal. Paytables vary by casino floor; these twelve are the standard published schedules, from each family's full-pay benchmark down the short-pay ladder casinos actually stock.
- Mathematical basis
- Every figure is exact, not simulated. The engine evaluates all C(52,5) = 2,598,960 possible deals, prices each of the 32 holds per deal by exact enumeration of draw completions (via a subset-aggregation + inclusion–exclusion core that a cross-check suite holds equal to direct enumeration on every hold to nine decimals), and keeps the best. The twelve resulting returns — from full-pay Deuces Wild's 100.7620% player edge down to 6/5 Jacks or Better's 94.9961% — each reproduced the published figure to six decimals and are committed as a versioned artifact the pages read. The Play tab's strategy verdicts and the Lab's simulation run the same solver; the Lab's Monte-Carlo only validates the exact figure, never redefines it.
- Engine version
- video-poker engine 1.0
- Validation
- Unit tests — both hand evaluators (standard + Deuces Wild) against oracle cross-checks, plus an exhaustive sweep of all 4,560 three-plus-wild hands pinning the full category distribution; all twelve paytables against the published schedules including royal jackpot tiers and Bonus Poker quad tiers; the reference solver against published strategy anchors; the fast core against the reference solver on every hold of sampled hands across all three paytables; and the committed RTP artifact pinned against the live paytables from both ends. 54 engine tests in CI plus the offline full-enumeration generator.
- Last reviewed
- Independent adversarial review (D-008) passed 2026-07-27: a separate reviewer's from-scratch implementation — own evaluators, own enumeration pipeline — matched the evaluator on all 2,598,960 hands in both modes with zero mismatches, matched hold EVs to 1e-10, and reproduced all three exact returns to ~1e-9 against Wizard of Odds' published figures. No critical or material findings; minor findings fixed with regression tests.