Newer Video Poker Formats: Multi-Hand, Ultimate X and Spin Poker

Explore multi-hand video poker, Ultimate X multipliers, and Spin Poker grids. Learn how stake sizes, swing, and RTP work per deal.

Newer video poker games still deal five cards and let you draw, but they change how much one deal puts at stake and how the results arrive. Multi-hand games apply one set of holds to anything from three to a hundred hands. Ultimate X is an optional feature that doubles the coins on a line in exchange for multipliers that carry forward, and Spin Poker spreads one deck across a grid. This guide explains each format, prices it in pounds on a 25p line, covers progressive royal flush meters and the optional double up and finishes with a comparison table. Which formats appear, and with which pay tables, varies from site to site, so the screen has the last word. Where no source is named, the figures are our own exact counts.

One Set of Holds, Many Hands

A multi-hand game deals a single starting hand to you and then plays it out on several lines. Your holds are copied onto every line, and each line refills its discarded positions from the unseen cards, with no influence from the others. One pay table covers them all and each line is settled on its own. Names follow the line count, running from Triple Play up to Fifty Play and One Hundred Play, and since every line carries a bet, a ten-line deal puts ten hands’ worth of money at risk.

Take the deal A♠ A♦ 9♥ 6♣ 3♠ in 9/6 Jacks or Better and keep the pair of aces. Every line draws its three replacements from the same 47 unseen cards, so each one faces the single-hand odds below. With five lines, all of them end as a bare pair in 18.4% of such deals, and the second table shows how the chance that at least one line reaches four aces builds as lines are added.

Some things are shared and some are private. The five dealt cards and your holds belong to every line, while each line’s draw is its own. More lines multiply the stake and the chances at large hands, but they never improve the cards you began with.

Stake and Swing as Lines Are Added

The table assumes five 5p coins on every line, a line bet of 25p, and 9/6 Jacks or Better throughout. For each game it gives the stake for one deal, the expected cost of a hundred deals and the swing of a single deal, which is the standard deviation of that deal’s total payout, in pounds and per pound staked.

Swing in pounds rises with every line, but more slowly than the stake does, because the lines share one deal. Ten lines stake ten times what one line does, yet the swing is only 4.4 times larger. The reason lies in the variance of one 9/6 hand, 19.51: 1.97 of it belongs to the five dealt cards, which every line inherits, and 17.55 belongs to the draw, which each line experiences separately. Adding lines washes out the draw and leaves the deal alone, so per pound staked the swing can never fall below 1.40. It is 4.42 with a single line and 1.46 with a hundred.

The number of lines leaves the return alone. Each line is an ordinary hand on the pay table in front of you, so 9/6 Jacks or Better has an expected cost of £4.56 per £1,000 staked, however many lines play. What changes is how quickly the money moves: at 600 deals an hour, Ten Play at 25p a line stakes £1,500, of which £6.84 is the expected cost. Multi-line editions exist for several families, including Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild and Jacks or Better. Their pay tables differ, so look at the table before you count lines.

Four to a Royal: The Chase Across the Lines

Suppose the deal gives you four cards to a royal flush and you keep them. A line needs one specific card from the 47 unseen, so it completes the royal one time in 47, and the chance that some line does so rises with the number of lines.

On a 25p line, which is five 5p coins, a completed royal pays 4,000 coins, or £200. Being dealt four to a royal happens roughly once in every 2,800 deals, so this table describes a rare moment. Over time, the extra lines bring extra royal chances in proportion to the extra money staked, which is why the return stays where it was.

Ultimate X: Ten Coins a Line and Multipliers That Carry Forward

Ultimate X is an optional IGT feature that sits on top of Triple Play, Five Play and Ten Play games. Betting the maximum of 10 coins a line, twice the usual five, switches it on. A paying hand then pays at once and also earns a multiplier for the following hand in the same position, and a multiplier already earned can be used without paying for the feature again. The table below reproduces the Jacks or Better multipliers that the Wizard of Odds publishes from IGT’s tables. A 1 means no multiplier, and the others depend on the winning hand and on the number of lines.

A Five Play line that finishes with a full house earns a multiplier of 12, so whatever the following hand in that position wins is paid 12 times over. At 5p a coin the feature takes a line from 25p to 50p and a Five Play deal from £1.25 to £2.50, so check the new total before you press deal.

For Jacks or Better, the Wizard of Odds lists returns with the feature on four tables only: 6/5, 7/5, 8/5 and 8/6. It publishes none for the full-pay 9/6.

The pay table underneath still sets the price: on Ten Play, 6/5 returns 95.67% and 8/6 returns 99.42%, a gap of almost four points. The Wizard of Odds also notes that optimal play depends on the multipliers held for the current hand, although a single strategy per game performs near optimally, so a chart written for the plain game is close without being exact. Our guide to which cards to hold covers that plain game.

Spin Poker: One Deck Across a Grid

Spin Poker plays on a grid of 15 positions, five across and three deep. The bet deals five cards along the middle row, you choose your holds and each held card is mirrored in the positions above and below it. Every remaining position is then filled from the 47 undealt cards, so no card can appear twice. Up to nine paylines can be active, each is paid as a poker hand in its own right, and your stake is the line bet multiplied by the number of active lines.

Compare that with Ten Play. A multi-hand game gives each line its own fresh pool of cards, whereas every Spin Poker line draws from one shared pool of 47. According to the Wizard of Odds, the odds and the best play on each line match the ordinary game on the same pay table, so the return per line is unchanged. What differs is how results cluster. In an answer on the two games, the Las Vegas Advisor says the average score stays the same, yet royal flushes bunch together and more sessions end behind.

Swing puts numbers on the difference. A single 9/6 Jacks or Better hand has a swing of 4.42 bets. With five lines, a multi-hand game, in which only the dealt cards are shared, reads 5.23 and Spin Poker reads 5.90. With nine lines the two figures are 5.94 and 7.28. Per line the return is identical, but the ride is bumpier.

Progressive Meters and What They Do to the Return

A progressive game links the royal flush prize to a meter that climbs as people play, so the top prize moves away from its standard 800 per coin. That raises the return of the whole game, and our exact solution shows by how much. For 9/6 Jacks or Better a royal worth 900 per coin returns 99.80%, 976 per coin returns 100.00% and 1,000 per coin returns 100.07%, compared with 99.54% at 800. Every extra 100 per coin adds roughly a quarter of a percentage point.

The reverse question is how large the royal must grow before a Jacks or Better table reaches 100% with perfect play and every other row as printed. The last column turns the answer into a prize for a £1 hand of five 20p coins.

The table is a warning as much as a guide. A meter that lifts a 9/6 game to break-even would still leave 8/5 well short, because that table needs a royal worth about 1,734 per coin. Even at break-even, the average depends on a hand that turns up once in roughly 40,000, so a long wait is ordinary and a high meter is never overdue. Before you play, look at the pay table underneath, the number of coins needed to qualify and the way the prize is awarded.

Double Up: A Card Gamble After a Win

Some games let you gamble a win on a card comparison, usually called the double up. Win the comparison and the prize doubles; lose it and the prize is gone. It sits outside the pay table and its rules differ between games, so read the screen first. Two details matter most: how ties are settled and whether the gamble can be repeated.

The simplest version, shown only as an illustration, has you and the game each turn over one card from a full 52-card pack, with the higher card winning. In 17 such duels you would expect 8 wins, 8 losses and 1 tie. When a tie hands your prize back, the gamble is fair on average. When a tie loses, it takes 5.9% of the amount at risk on average.

Either way, the gamble lets a win be kept, doubled or lost, so it adds to the swing and cannot make the game cheaper. The moment after a win is when saying no is hardest, so decide beforehand whether you will ever use it.

The Formats Side by Side

Whatever the format, two questions come first: what one deal costs in total, and which pay table sits underneath it. Our guide to reading a pay table answers the second, and which formats appear in a lobby is up to each operator and its software suppliers.

Seven Guides That Complete the Series

The remaining seven guides in the series are listed below, and the main video poker guide ties them together:

• the video poker beginner’s guide: the buttons, the credit meter and what a licensed site shows you before the first deal.
• video poker pay tables and hand odds: what each hand adds to the return, row by row.
• Jacks or Better and its bonus variants: Bonus Poker, Aces and Faces, Double Bonus and the kicker games compared on return and swing.
• the Deuces Wild and Joker guide: what wild cards do to the pay table, the swing and the right hold.
• video poker maths, RTP, and volatility: what the return means in pounds an hour and how far real sessions stray from it.
• which cards to hold in video poker: the order of play for 9/6 Jacks or Better, with exact values.
• the UK regulation and safety guide: GamStop, deposit limits and what an unlicensed site leaves out.

The Whole Deal Is Your Budget Line

Extra lines, multipliers and grids are paid entertainment, like every video poker format. Each makes a single deal bigger and its results wilder, yet the expected cost remains and no format opens a route to profit. Set your budget against the cost of the whole deal and not the line bet, count how many deals it buys and put the deposit limits, time-outs and GamStop described on our safer gambling pages to work.

Author:

Lucas Portela

Owner, BoldGambler • Avanhandava/SP

Oddsmaker, affiliate and content creator in the iGaming industry.

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