9/6 Jacks or Better: How to Read a Video Poker Paytable
"9/6 Jacks or Better" is shorthand for the best commonly available video poker machine. The two numbers are the full house and flush payouts per coin, and they are the two numbers casinos adjust when they want to take more of your money without changing anything you'd notice.
Learning to read them takes three seconds per machine and is worth more than any strategy you'll ever learn.
The full-pay Jacks or Better table
Per coin, at five coins bet:
| Hand | 1 coin | 5 coins |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 | 4,000 |
| 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 |
Return with perfect play: 99.54%.
The two bolded rows are the "9/6". Every other row is essentially fixed across machines. Casinos adjust those two because they're in the middle of the table where nobody looks.
What changing them costs
| Machine | Full house | Flush | Return | Cost vs 9/6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 | 9 | 6 | 99.54% | — |
| 9/5 | 9 | 5 | 98.45% | −1.09% |
| 8/6 | 8 | 6 | 98.39% | −1.15% |
| 8/5 | 8 | 5 | 97.30% | −2.24% |
| 7/5 | 7 | 5 | 96.15% | −3.39% |
| 6/5 | 6 | 5 | 95.00% | −4.54% |
Every single point of full house payout is worth about 1.1% of return. Every point of flush is worth about 1.1%.
Put that against strategy: the difference between perfect play and decent play on Jacks or Better is maybe 0.5%. The difference between a 9/6 machine and an 8/5 machine is 2.24%. The machine you choose matters four times more than how well you play it, and the choice takes three seconds.
The three-second check
Before you put money in:
- Find the full house row. Note the 1-coin number.
- Find the flush row. Note the 1-coin number.
- That's the machine. 9/6, play it. 8/5, walk.
Nothing else on the table typically varies, so those two numbers characterise the whole machine.
Where 9/6 still exists: downtown Las Vegas and locals casinos, some regional markets, higher denominations. Where it doesn't: most Strip casinos, most airports, most bars. As a rule, the better the carpet, the worse the paytable.
Why five coins, always
The royal flush pays 250 per coin at 1–4 coins and 800 per coin at 5. That bonus at max coins is where a large slice of the machine's 99.54% return sits.
Playing four coins instead of five drops the return to about 98.0% — a 1.5% cost, larger than almost any strategy error you could make.
If max coins on a quarter machine is more than you want to bet, play a nickel machine at max coins. Never play a quarter machine at less than five coins. This is the most common expensive mistake in video poker and it's entirely avoidable.
What "99.54% return" actually means
It does not mean you get 99.54% of your money back in a session.
It means that averaged over an enormous number of hands, with perfect play, the machine returns 99.54 cents per dollar cycled through it — and that average includes the royal flush, which appears roughly once every 40,000 hands and pays 800-for-1.
Take the royal out and the same machine returns about 97.5%. So the typical session is below average by design, with the shortfall repaid by rare enormous hands. Video poker is a high-variance game wearing a low-house-edge number, and that mismatch is what surprises people.
Practically: expect long stretches below break-even. That's not a broken machine or a cold streak; it's the shape of the distribution.
The other families
The same logic — read the paytable, it defines the game — applies across the families, and each has its own shorthand:
- Bonus Poker — 8/5 full-pay returns 99.17%. Quads pay more, full house and flush pay less.
- Double Bonus — 10/7 full-pay returns 100.17%. Above 100% with perfect play, and perfect play here is genuinely hard.
- Double Double Bonus — 9/6 returns 98.98%. Four aces with a low kicker pays enormously, which changes the strategy substantially — you break hands you would never break in Jacks or Better.
- Deuces Wild — full-pay ("NSUD" and full-pay variants) exceeds 100%, but full-pay Deuces is now rare and the common paytables are much worse.
The strategies differ between families, they are not adjustments of one another. Playing Jacks or Better strategy on a Double Double Bonus machine costs meaningfully more than the paytable difference alone.
Practising on the right machine
The reason paytable-driven strategy matters is that a memorised chart is only correct for the machine it was derived from.
Casino Trainer's video poker solver reads the paytable and enumerates every hold against every possible draw — about 3.6 million hands per deal — so the correct play is computed for the machine in front of you rather than looked up. It ships nine paytables across five families, and because the strategy comes from the paytable rather than a chart, adding a machine is a config entry and the strategy is right for it immediately.
After each hand it names the correct hold, the pattern behind it, and what your choice cost in expected value.
Virtual credits only, no real-money play.
The summary
- 9/6 = full house pays 9, flush pays 6. 99.54% with perfect play.
- Each point off either is worth about 1.1% of return.
- Machine choice matters ~4× more than play quality. Check before sitting.
- Always play max coins, at a denomination you're comfortable with.
- 99.54% includes a royal flush you'll see once in 40,000 hands. Plan accordingly.
Want the correct hold named on nine different paytables? Get Casino Trainer — virtual credits only.
Want the correct play named for you, hand by hand? Get Casino Trainer — virtual credits only, never real money.