Video poker: the paytable is the game

How a hand works

You choose a stake, usually one to five coins of whatever denomination the machine takes. Five cards are dealt from a shuffled fifty-two card deck. You press hold on the cards you want to keep (none, all five, or anything in between) and draw. The discarded cards are replaced from the remainder of that same deck, and the final five are compared against the paytable. If they make a paying hand, you are paid. If not, the hand is over.

That is the entire game loop. There is no opponent, no bluffing and no second draw. It is not really poker in the sense that the poker section means the word. Nobody is trying to read you. But the hand rankings are poker's, so anyone who knows a flush from a full house is already most of the way there.

What separates video poker from a slot machine is that your decisions change the outcome. A slot resolves the moment you spin. Here, the hold decision is a real choice with a measurably right and wrong answer, and the gap between playing well and playing carelessly on the same machine is worth several percent of everything you put through it.

How to read a paytable

The schedule on the screen lists every paying hand and what it returns per coin bet, across five columns for one to five coins. Reading it takes about ten seconds and it is the most valuable ten seconds available in the room.

Machines are named after two rows of that schedule: the full house and the flush, at one coin. A machine paying 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush is a 9/6 machine. One paying 8 and 5 is an 8/5. Those two rows are where operators cut the return, because they are hit often enough to matter and are easy to overlook: everything else on the schedule is frequently identical.

Here is what that single change does to Jacks or Better, the most common game, played with computer-perfect strategy at five coins:

Same game, same rules, same strategy, same screen artwork. A 6/5 machine costs more than ten times as much to play as the 9/6 machine that may be sitting next to it. This is the whole reason it is misleading to quote a single return for "video poker". The number belongs to the paytable, not to the game.

One more row is worth checking: the royal flush at five coins. On a normal machine the royal pays 250 per coin at one to four coins and jumps to 4,000 total at five coins (800 per coin). That jump is worth roughly a percentage and a half of the return, so a machine played at less than max coins is giving that away. If the five-coin bet is more than you want to risk, the answer is a smaller denomination machine, not fewer coins.

The hands that pay

Jacks or Better pays from a pair of jacks upward. Anything weaker returns nothing: a pair of tens, ace high. That is why a large share of hands lose outright.

Note how flat the bottom of the schedule is. A pair of jacks returns your stake and nothing more, and two pair doubles it. Almost all the money in the game sits in hands you will rarely make, which is what gives video poker its characteristic shape: long stretches of small losses punctuated by something large. A royal flush arrives roughly once in forty thousand hands played properly, and the quoted 99.54% includes it. Remove the royal from the calculation and the machine returns about 97.5%.

A simplified strategy for 9/6 Jacks or Better

Every deal has one mathematically best hold, and it can be computed exactly because the deck is known and finite. That is the unusual thing about video poker: unlike a slot, the correct play is a fact rather than an opinion.

The list below is a simplified priority order. Look down it and play the first line your five cards can make. A full computer-derived chart has more rows and several exceptions this one skips, so it is worth a fraction of a percent less than perfect play. Near enough for anyone not playing professionally, and far better than instinct.

1. Royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind: hold the paying hand.
2. Four cards to a royal flush (break a made flush or straight for this, but never a made straight flush).
3. Three of a kind, straight, flush, full house.
4. Four cards to a straight flush.
5. Two pair.
6. High pair: jacks, queens, kings or aces.
7. Four cards to a flush.
8. Low pair: twos through tens.
9. Four cards to an open-ended straight.
10. Two suited high cards.
11. Three cards to a straight flush.
12. Two unsuited high cards: keep the two lowest of them.
13. Suited ten with one high card.
14. One high card.
15. Nothing: discard all five.

Three lines on that list account for most of the money lost by casual players.

A low pair beats four cards to a straight. It looks wrong, because the straight draw feels closer to something. The pair is worth more because it can become three of a kind, a full house or four of a kind, and it wins considerably more often than the straight completes.

A low pair also beats holding three high cards. Keeping A K Q and drawing two is a common and expensive habit; the pair of fours you threw away was the better hand.

Never hold a kicker. With three of a kind or four of a kind, discard everything else. Keeping an ace alongside three sevens "for luck" only removes a card that could have improved the hand.

And one that costs the most of all: break a made flush or a made straight when you are one card from a royal. Giving up a certain 6 to chase an 800 happens rarely, and it is right every time it comes up.

The main variants

Every variant is a different paytable wearing a different name, and each has its own strategy. A chart written for Jacks or Better will actively cost you money on Deuces Wild.

• Jacks or Better. The baseline, and the one to learn first. Simplest strategy, lowest variance, clearest paytables.
• Bonus Poker and Double Bonus. Jacks or Better with larger payouts for particular four of a kinds, funded by cuts elsewhere in the schedule. Slightly swingier.
• Double Double Bonus. Very large four of a kind payouts, with a kicker card affecting some of them, paid for by a weaker two pair. High variance. Long dry spells are normal on it.
• Deuces Wild. All four twos are wild, so the paytable starts at three of a kind rather than a pair. Completely different strategy. The famous "full pay" version returns fractionally over 100% with flawless play, which is exactly why it is almost never offered any more. If a machine advertises Deuces Wild, assume its paytable has been cut until you have checked every row.
• Joker Poker. Fifty-three cards with one wild joker, and several distinct paytable families under the same name.

Multi-hand machines play the same held cards across three, ten or fifty hands at once, and do not change the return per hand at all. They multiply both the stake and the swings. A fifty-hand machine at one coin a hand is a fifty-coin bet, and it is worth being clear-eyed that this is what you are doing.

Which paytable a lobby carries is chosen by the operator, so online the version in front of you is somebody else's decision rather than yours. That makes the site itself part of the paytable question, and the operators we have looked at each have a page.

What costs players money

• Not reading the paytable. The single biggest one. Two identical-looking machines can differ by several percent, and the difference is visible before you insert anything.
• Playing fewer than five coins. Gives up the royal flush bonus, which is worth around one and a half percent. Drop the denomination instead.
• Using the wrong strategy for the variant. Jacks or Better holds applied to Deuces Wild are badly wrong.
• Chasing the royal. It arrives about once in forty thousand hands. It is already priced into the return figure; playing longer to "get it back" simply buys more house edge.
• Reading the return as a promise. 99.54% is a long-run average under perfect play, not a description of your evening. Real sessions land far from it in both directions, and real play is rarely perfect.

Online there is a sixth. The machine settles a win instantly, but getting that balance out of the account is a separate process with conditions of its own, and the deposit to withdrawal path is better read before than after.

Video poker and the law in Malaysia

Gambling in Malaysia is restricted under the Common Gaming Houses Act 1953 and the Betting Act 1953, and it is additionally prohibited for Muslims under Sharia law. There is one licensed land-based casino in the country, and online gambling is not licensed for the domestic market. This page explains how the machines work and how to tell a good paytable from a bad one. It is not an argument that you should play, and nothing here should be read as saying online play is legal here.

Machine games deserve one specific caution. A video poker screen is fast, solitary and easy to keep feeding, and a good paytable makes losses slow rather than absent — 99.54% is still a losing proposition over enough hands. Decide the amount and the time before you sit down, and treat both as fixed. 18+.