Video Poker Strategy: Which Cards to Hold and Mistakes to Avoid

Once the cards are dealt, your only decision is the hold. This guide shows how the best hold is chosen, how many cards it usually keeps, a 16-step order of preference for 9/6 Jacks or Better that gives up almost nothing, six deals in which the tempting hold loses, what common mistakes cost in pounds and what no hold or system can alter.

How a Best Hold Is Chosen

A video poker deal offers 32 possible holds, from keeping every card to keeping none. To rank them, work out what each one pays on average across every draw that could follow, then pick the largest. Do that on every deal of 9/6 Jacks or Better and you get the 99.54% return quoted for the game. The best hold can still be beaten by a weaker one on any single hand, so strategy has to be judged across millions of deals and not by the next result.

Only two things feed that calculation: your five cards and the pay table on the screen. How the last hand went, how long you have been playing and how much you have left play no part. Raise one prize and every card combination that can reach it gains value, so the best hold changes whenever the table does.

Hold Sizes: How Many Cards Stay

How many cards does the best hold keep? Across all 2,598,960 possible starting hands, the table gives the answer for 9/6 Jacks or Better.

Pairs and combinations of high cards settle most deals, which is why two-card holds top the list. Keeping all five cards is right in only 0.7% of deals, even though 20.6% of deals already pay something before the draw. The skill lies mostly in choosing between small holds, which a ranked list handles well.

Sixteen Steps for 9/6 Jacks or Better

Read the list from the top and stop at the first line your hand matches, keeping exactly those cards. High cards means jacks, queens, kings and aces. An outside straight draw is four consecutive cards that can be completed at either end, such as 5-6-7-8, which needs a 4 or a 9. Each line starts with the share of deals in which it applies first. Played faithfully, the list returns 99.46%, which is 0.08 points below the 99.54% of perfect play. It follows the simple strategy that the Wizard of Odds publishes for this table, though the return was recomputed here by an exact count.

1. 0.03% of deals: keep a made royal flush, straight flush or four of a kind.
2. 0.04% of deals: keep four cards to a royal flush.
3. 2.84% of deals: keep a made full house, flush, straight or three of a kind.
4. 0.20% of deals: keep four cards to a straight flush.
5. 4.75% of deals: keep two pair.
6. 12.98% of deals: keep a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces.
7. 1.09% of deals: keep three cards to a royal flush.
8. 3.29% of deals: keep four cards to a flush.
9. 28.22% of deals: keep a pair of tens or lower.
10. 2.27% of deals: keep four cards to an outside straight.
11. 6.82% of deals: keep two suited high cards.
12. 2.53% of deals: keep three cards to a straight flush.
13. 15.55% of deals: keep two unsuited high cards (from three or more, keep the lowest two).
14. 1.14% of deals: keep the 10 when it is suited with a jack, queen or king.
15. 15.01% of deals: keep a single high card.
16. 3.25% of deals: keep nothing and draw five new cards.

The shortcut has a price. The list differs from the best hold in 2.3% of deals, which works out at one bet lost per 1,181 hands, or 51p an hour at £1 a hand and 600 hands an hour. For a list you can memorise, that is a small fee.

Six Deals Where Instinct Loses

A few holds look wrong until you see the numbers. Each row gives a deal, the tempting hold and the better one, with each hold’s average return per coin bet, on the 9/6 Jacks or Better table.

Each row has its own lesson. Four to a royal flush is worth 18.47 against 4.00 for a made straight, because the prize at the top dwarfs everything else. In the first row, four to a flush beats three to a royal, helped by the 10 of diamonds, which would also complete a straight flush. Three of a kind is better with two fresh cards than with a kicker kept beside it, and the same logic favours throwing away the fifth card. In the fourth row, adding the king to a suited jack and queen lowers the value, since a suited pair is worth more than three mixed high cards. Three to a royal beats a low pair, and a low pair beats two unsuited high cards.

What Common Mistakes Cost

Many costly mistakes happen before the first deal, in the choice of game and the number of coins, and others come from carrying a chart to the wrong game. The table prices each habit against perfect play on the same game, giving the extra expected cost per £1,000 staked and across a 600-hand hour at £1 a hand.

Notice the last three rows. A chart carried to the wrong game can cost far more than a stray wrong hold, and the last row costs more than every other habit in the table combined. The next table ranks nine games and pay tables by what the Jacks or Better chart loses on them, smallest first.

On the tables that share the shape of the parent game, the borrowed chart loses almost nothing. As the pay table moves away from it, the chart fails fast, so before you try an unfamiliar game, find the strategy written for that exact table. The guide to Double Bonus and its relatives and the Deuces Wild and Joker guide show where the holds move.

What No Hold or System Can Change

A hold cannot move the pay table. Even perfect play on 8/5 Jacks or Better is expected to cost 2.70% of everything staked, and on 9/6 only 36.6% of 600-hand hours end ahead, a point the guide to hours and budgets develops.

Strategy cannot find patterns either, because there are none to find. A fresh shuffle precedes every hand, no royal flush is ever due and counting the cards you have seen tells you nothing about the next deal. RTS 7A of the Gambling Commission’s technical standards requires results to be acceptably random and says that adaptive behaviour, which it defines as a compensated game, is not permitted. Its guidance adds that this rules out automatic or manual interventions that change the probabilities.

Betting systems fail too. The house keeps the same fixed fraction of everything staked whether you raise your bet after a loss or trim it after a win, so a bigger or smaller bet changes the money at risk and never the fraction kept.

Where Strategy Meets the Rest of the Series

Seven other guides pick up where this one stops. They are listed below, and the overview of the whole series puts all eight side by side:

• how to play video poker in the UK: bet, deal, hold and draw followed through one real hand, with an hour priced in pounds.
• how to read a pay table: which rows set the price of a game and where its return comes from.
• Bonus Poker and Double Bonus compared: return, hit rate and swing for each well-known table.
• wild-card video poker explained: Deuces Wild in three pay tables, Joker Poker and the holds that change.
• the multi-hand video poker guide: three to a hundred hands from a single deal, priced in pounds.
• how video poker returns are worked out: house edge, the royal flush share and how to size a stake.
• how the Gambling Commission oversees casino games: licensing, technical standards, complaints and the checks to make before a deposit.

A Better Hold Still Has a Price

Good holds make video poker cheaper without making it free. It stays paid entertainment, every hand carries an expected cost and no chart, system or hot streak opens a route to profit. Agree a budget and a time limit before the first deal, and lean on the tools that our safer gambling pages explain.

Author:

Lucas Portela

Owner, BoldGambler • Avanhandava/SP

Oddsmaker, affiliate and content creator in the iGaming industry.

LinkedInE-mail