Jacks or Better — the one machine where your choices matter. Play it with the exact value of every possible hold, then see how a “9/6” machine returns 99.54% and what each cheaper pay table costs.
| Hand | 1 coin | 2 coins | 3 coins | 4 coins | 5 coins (current bet) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| Straight Flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a Kind | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Full House | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a Kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two Pair | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or Better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Press DEAL to start.
Video poker deals from one honest 52-card deck, so everything can be counted: all 2,598,960 deals, each of the 32 ways to play them, and every card the draw could bring. With the best hold for every deal, that gives the machine’s exact payback. Nothing on this tab is simulated.
At five coins. Computed from the best of 32 holds for each of the 134,459 suit-distinct deals, weighted over all 2,598,960.
How often perfect play ends on each hand, and how much of the payback it provides. The royal flush comes once in about 40,000 hands yet carries two percent of the return — in the short run you are playing a worse game than the label says.
| Hand | Share of payback | Pays | After the draw | 1 in | On the deal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 2.0% | 800 | 0.0025% | 40,390.55 | 0.0002% |
| Straight Flush | 0.5% | 50 | 0.0109% | 9,148.37 | 0.0014% |
| Four of a Kind | 5.9% | 25 | 0.24% | 423.27 | 0.0240% |
| Full House | 10.4% | 9 | 1.15% | 86.86 | 0.14% |
| Flush | 6.6% | 6 | 1.10% | 90.79 | 0.20% |
| Straight | 4.5% | 4 | 1.12% | 89.05 | 0.39% |
| Three of a Kind | 22.4% | 3 | 7.44% | 13.43 | 2.11% |
| Two Pair | 26.0% | 2 | 12.93% | 7.74 | 4.75% |
| Jacks or Better | 21.6% | 1 | 21.46% | 4.66 | 13.00% |
| Nothing | — | 0 | 54.54% | 1.83 | 79.37% |
Casinos change only two lines — what a full house and a flush pay. Each coin taken off those lines costs about 1.1 points of payback.
| Machine | Payback | House edge | Full house / flush | Cost per 1,000 hands at 5 coins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 | 99.5439% | 0.46% | 9 / 6 | 22.8 |
| 9/5 | 98.4498% | 1.55% | 9 / 5 | 77.5 |
| 8/6 | 98.3927% | 1.61% | 8 / 6 | 80.4 |
| 8/5 | 97.2984% | 2.70% | 8 / 5 | 135.1 |
| 7/5 | 96.1472% | 3.85% | 7 / 5 | 192.6 |
| 6/5 | 94.9961% | 5.00% | 6 / 5 | 250.2 |
Most of the time the right play is two cards — usually a pair or two high cards. Throwing all five away is right about one hand in thirty.
Five deals where instinct and arithmetic disagree: the exact value of the best play against the tempting one, on this pay table.
Calculating every draw…
Every strategy gets the same five cards and the same replacement cards on a 9/6 machine, betting five coins a hand. Payback is shown per coin bet, so a royal flush counts as 800 per coin. The dashed lines are each strategy’s exact payback.
Sessions of perfect play at five coins a hand on a 9/6 machine. On average a session loses exactly what the payback says — but that average is propped up by rare royal flushes, so the typical session does worse.