Jacks or Better and the Bonus Poker Family

Compare Jacks or Better with Bonus and Double Bonus poker. See how pay tables, kickers, and swings change your return and strategy.

Most of the video poker in a British lobby belongs to one family. Jacks or Better is the parent, and Bonus Poker, Bonus Poker Deluxe, Aces and Faces, All American Poker and the three Double Bonus games are its children. They share a deck, the same hand rankings and the same draw. Only the pay table differs, and a pay table works like a budget: raise a prize in one row and another row has to fall. This guide uses the parent as its benchmark, shows where each child finds the money for its bigger prizes, prices a hand of three aces in eight games, climbs the kicker ladder, tracks a hold that changes sides from one game to the next and ends with one table that ranks the whole family.

The Parent Game and Its Benchmarks

Nine-six Jacks or Better is the reference point for everything below. Held correctly on every deal it returns 99.54%, leaving the house 0.46%, and a prize arrives on 45.5% of hands. One hand swings by 4.4 bets. The table is easy to hold in the head: a pair of jacks or better pays 1, two pair 2, three of a kind 3, a straight 4, a flush 6, a full house 9, four of a kind 25, a straight flush 50 and a royal flush 800 for each coin of a five-coin bet. At £1 a hand and 600 hands an hour, the expected cost is £2.74 an hour.

Every variant that follows is judged by three questions. Does the return rise or fall against that benchmark? How many hands pay anything? How rough is the ride? Most of the variants change at least one of the three, and several change all of them.

Where Each Bonus Game Finds Its Money

A pay table has to balance, so a bigger prize at the top is paid for by a smaller one further down. The table sets out, for the best-known table of each game, which prizes grow and which rows give way when you compare it with Jacks or Better 9/6.

Notice what never moves. The pair of jacks keeps paying 1 and the royal flush keeps paying 800 per coin in every table above, so the changes happen in the middle of the pay table. Two pair, three of a kind, the full house and the flush are the rows that land most often, which is why they are the rows that fund the new prizes. A game can therefore grow much rougher without growing any more generous.

The Three Closest Cousins of Jacks or Better

Bonus Poker, Bonus Poker Deluxe and Aces and Faces sit closest to the parent. Four of a kind is the only row that receives new money, so how often it arrives and what it pays shape the character of each game.

Bonus Poker leaves most fours of a kind at 25 and raises only the aces and the 2s, 3s and 4s. That is why it returns 99.17%, 0.37 percentage points below the parent. Aces and Faces favours the court cards instead: four aces pay 80, and four jacks, queens or kings pay 40, for a return of 99.26%. Bonus Poker Deluxe pays a flat 80 for every four of a kind, lets two pair drop to 1 and lands at 99.64%, a shade above Jacks or Better.

The arrival rate tells the real story. Four of a kind comes about once in 423 hands in the parent and once in 424 in Deluxe, so the same event simply pays more than three times as much. The extra weight shows in the last column: hands paying 25 or more supply 21% of the Deluxe return against 8% in the parent.

Three Aces Across Eight Games

One deal shows how differently these tables value a made hand. Dealt A♠ A♥ A♦ 9♠ 7♣, you already hold three of a kind, which pays 3 in every table below except Triple Double Bonus, where it pays 2. The question is what two fresh cards are worth if you keep the aces and throw the 7 and the 9 away.

The made hand is a floor and never a destination. Two cards drawn from the 47 you cannot see include the last ace 4.3% of the time, and the bonus tables pay so much for that card that the draw is worth 16.26 in Triple Double Bonus against 2.00 for standing pat. Even in the parent the draw is worth 4.30 against 3.00.

The Kicker Ladder in Double Double and Triple Double Bonus

Here the fifth card counts. Four of a kind is paid by rank, with a premium when the kicker, which is the fifth card, helps. The table lists the prizes per coin from the top of the ladder down.

The top rungs are rare. In Double Double Bonus 10/6 the 400 prize arrives about once in 16,236 hands, which puts it well outside an ordinary session. The game swings at 6.5 bets per hand, and Triple Double Bonus 9/7 swings at 9.9. Hands paying 25 or more supply 21% and 28% of the two returns, against 8% in Jacks or Better.

The kicker tempts players to keep a card they should discard. Dealt K♣ 7♠ 3♠ 3♥ 3♦ in Double Double Bonus 9/6, keeping only the three 3s and drawing two cards is worth 7.53 per coin bet. Keeping the king or the 7 beside them is worth 5.02, and keeping all five is worth 3.00. Discarding the extra card gives a second look at the fourth 3, and that chance outweighs any kicker.

Three Spades to a Royal, or Four to a Flush?

The same five cards can call for different holds in different games. Take K♠ Q♠ J♠ 3♠ 3♥. The pair of 3s is never the best hold in the five tables below, so the real choice is between three to a royal flush (K♠ Q♠ J♠) and four to a flush (K♠ Q♠ J♠ 3♠).

The four-card hold has a short list of winners. Any of the nine spades still in the deck makes the flush, and any of the nine kings, queens and jacks outside spades makes a pair of jacks or better, paying 1. Its value therefore moves only with the flush row. The three-card hold also draws on the royal, straight, three of a kind and two pair rows, so it moves with those too.

The flush row alone does not decide it. All American Poker pays 8 for a flush yet still prefers the royal draw, while Double Bonus pays 7 and prefers the flush. In Double Bonus the margin is only 0.01 of a coin, so a single digit in the pay table can turn the answer round. A chart learned on one game is a guess on the next, a point our strategy and mistakes guide follows through.

The Price of Shaving the Double Bonus Games

Reduced versions of the Double Bonus games exist, with a digit or two shaved from the full house and flush rows. The table sets each full-pay table beside them, with the expected cost of staking £1,000 and the extra paid against full pay.

A single step can cost more than the gap between two games. Dropping Triple Double Bonus from 9/7 to 8/5 gives up 3.6 percentage points, far more than the 0.37 that separates Jacks or Better 9/6 from Bonus Poker 8/5. Read the digits on the pay table before the name of the game.

The Family Ranked From Calm to Rough

The last table ranks the best-known table of each game by swing, calmest first, and turns the return into the result of an hour of 600 hands at £1 a hand, which sends £600 through the machine. Every figure assumes perfect play and comes from an exact count of the 2,598,960 starting hands.

Two of the nine tables return more than 100%: Double Bonus 10/7 at 100.17% and Double Double Bonus 10/6 at 100.07%. That describes a long-run average over a vast number of hands, and it does not describe an hour. On Double Bonus 10/7, an hour of 600 hands at £1 a hand ends ahead only 41% of the time, and the middle hour loses £22. The guide to budgets and volatility explains how those odds are calculated.

Hold charts do not travel between these games either. Used on Double Double Bonus 9/6, the Jacks or Better chart gives up 0.54 percentage points of return, and it picks a different best hold in 11% of deals.

Seven More Guides to Read Next

Seven more guides continue the series. Choose one below, or go back to the video poker hub to see all eight together:

• your first hand of video poker: why the fifth coin matters and what a pound buys at the machine.
• the hand rankings and pay table guide: the odds of every final hand, the 9/6 and 8/5 labels and a quick test for short-pay games.
• how wild cards change the game: why a pair stops paying and which hands become worth keeping.
• multi-hand, Ultimate X, and Spin Poker: how extra hands, multipliers and grids change what one deal costs.
• the video poker budgeting guide: swing, hit rate and the odds of finishing a session ahead.
• the costliest video poker mistakes: short pay tables, broken flushes, fewer than five coins and borrowed charts.
• video poker rules and player safety in the UK: what the Gambling Commission expects of licensed casinos and which tools you can switch on.

A Bigger Top Prize Is Still a Cost

Every game in this family is entertainment that carries a cost on each hand. A bonus prize changes when the money comes back and never whether the table keeps a share, and no hold or variant promises a profit. Decide a budget and a time limit before the first deal, and keep to the limits described on our safer gambling pages, which also point to help when the game stops being enjoyable.

Author:

Lucas Portela

Owner, BoldGambler • Avanhandava/SP

Oddsmaker, affiliate and content creator in the iGaming industry.

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