Video Poker Strategy: Why the Paytable Decides Everything

September 8, 2026

Video poker is unusual: it's the only common casino game where the mathematically perfect play is exactly computable on every single hand, with no assumptions and no approximation. Five cards are dealt, you choose which to hold, and there are only 32 possible holds. For each one, every possible draw can be enumerated. The best hold is simply the one with the highest average return.

Nothing is hidden. Which makes it the one game where "playing correctly" has a precise meaning — and where playing incorrectly has a precisely measurable cost.

The paytable is the game

Before any strategy: the strategy is a function of the paytable. Two machines both labelled "Jacks or Better" can have different correct plays and wildly different returns, because the strategy is derived from the payouts.

The full-pay Jacks or Better machine, "9/6" — meaning a full house pays 9 and a flush pays 6 — returns 99.54% with perfect play. Change only those two numbers:

That's a 4.5-point spread between the best and worst machine wearing the same name. No amount of skill on a 6/5 machine beats mediocre play on a 9/6 machine. Reading the paytable before you sit down is worth more than every strategy article ever written, including this one.

How the correct play is computed

For each of the 32 ways to hold or discard five cards, the solver enumerates every possible draw from the 47 remaining cards, scores each resulting hand against the paytable, and averages. That average is the hold's expected value. Highest EV wins.

Roughly 3.6 million hands are evaluated per deal. This is why the strategy is exactly right rather than approximately right — and why it automatically adapts to any paytable, instead of being a chart someone derived once for one machine.

The strategy, as a ranked list

Human-usable strategy is expressed as a ranked list of hand patterns: scan from the top and play the first pattern your five cards contain. For 9/6 Jacks or Better:

1. Royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind — hold all five
2. 4 to a royal flush
3. Full house, flush, straight, three of a kind
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
11. 2 suited high cards
12. 3 to a straight flush
13. 2 unsuited high cards
14. Suited 10 + face card
15. One high card
16. Discard everything

Note where low pair sits: at 9, above four to an outside straight and well above any high-card-only holding. That single placement is the source of more mistakes than anything else in the game.

The five mistakes that cost the most

1. Breaking a low pair to chase. You have 5-5 and three suited cards to a flush. The pair is worth more. Almost always.

2. Holding a kicker with a pair. Pair of kings plus an ace? Hold the kings, discard the ace. The kicker cannot improve anything and it removes a draw. This is pure loss with no upside.

3. Keeping three to a flush. Three suited cards is not a hand. Four is. Three suited cards almost always ranks below whatever else you're holding.

4. Holding all four low cards to an inside straight. An inside straight draw has four outs. It's below almost everything on the list.

5. Not playing max coins. The royal flush pays 250-for-1 on 1–4 coins and 800-for-1 on 5 coins. That jump is where a large share of the machine's return lives. Playing under max coins costs about 1.5% flat — worse than every strategy error above combined. If max coins is too big a bet, drop to a lower denomination machine and play max there.

Beyond Jacks or Better

The families all use the same solving method with different paytables and wild cards:

• Bonus Poker / Double Bonus / Double Double Bonus — quads pay more, sometimes with kicker bonuses, and everything else pays less to fund it. Higher variance, and the strategy genuinely differs: in Double Double Bonus you break hands you'd never break in Jacks or Better, because a four-aces-with-kicker hand pays enormously.
• Deuces Wild — four wild cards changes everything. Full-pay Deuces returns over 100% with perfect play, but "perfect play" is much harder and the paytable is almost never full-pay.
• Joker Poker — one wild card, 53-card deck, its own hand rankings.

The important point: these need different strategies, not adjusted ones. A player using Jacks or Better strategy on a Double Double Bonus machine is losing meaningfully more than the paytable alone would suggest.

Learning it

The list above is memorisable, but reading a list and applying it in two seconds on an unfamiliar five-card hand are different skills. And on any given hand, the difference between the best hold and a plausible-looking second-best hold is usually small enough that you won't notice being wrong — which is why the mistakes persist.

Casino Trainer solves each dealt hand exhaustively — every hold against every possible draw — and compares your choice to the best one, naming the pattern you should have played and what the error cost in expected value. Because it reads the paytable rather than a strategy chart, it's correct for all nine paytables across the five families it ships with; adding a machine is a config entry and the strategy is right for it immediately.

It also classifies your errors into patterns over time, so "you break low pairs to chase flushes" surfaces as a habit rather than as a hundred separate corrections.

Virtual credits only, no real-money play.

The summary

• Read the paytable first. It's worth more than strategy.
• Play max coins, at whatever denomination you can afford.
• Learn the ranked list for the specific machine family you play.
• Low pairs beat most draws. Internalise this one.
• Perfect play on a good machine returns about 99.5%. That's a small house edge, not a winning game — but it's the smallest edge on the floor.

Want the correct hold named on every hand? 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.