Video Poker Hands and How to Read a Pay Table

Understand video poker hands and pay tables. Compare 9/6 vs 8/5 odds, see exact hand probabilities, and spot trimmed tables.

The pay table above the cards is the most important thing on a video poker screen. It lists every winning hand, attaches a prize to each coin staked and so decides, row by row, the share of every stake that the game holds on to. Below, we rank the hands with examples, give the exact odds of every final hand in 9/6 Jacks or Better, explain what the digits in 9/6 and 8/5 stand for, show why one label means different things in different games, compare where paying hands start and close with five checks for trimmed tables.

The Hands in Order, With Examples

Rankings follow five-card poker with one difference: the only cards that count are your own five, because no rival hand is ever in play. An ace can start a run (ace, two, three, four, five) or finish one (ten, jack, queen, king, ace), but a run cannot wrap round, so a hand of queen, king, ace, two, three is merely ace high. The prizes below belong to 9/6 Jacks or Better on a five-coin bet.

A pair below jacks pays nothing, and neither does a hand that is merely ace high, which is where the name Jacks or Better comes from. Other games draw the line elsewhere, and wild-card games rank the hands differently altogether; our guide to wild-card video poker covers them.

How Often Each Final Hand Arrives

Each figure below is an exact count over every possible final hand when each deal is held in the best possible way. A hand’s share of the return is its chance multiplied by its prize, and the shares add up to the return of the whole game.

Small, frequent hands do most of the work. Three of a kind, two pair and a pair of jacks or better deliver 70% of everything the game pays back. The royal flush adds just 1.98 percentage points: strip it out and the game would return 97.56% instead of 99.54%. A royal comes along about once in 40,391 hands, a wait of some 67 hours at 600 hands an hour.

Decoding 9/6, 8/5 and the Rest

A Jacks or Better table is named with two numbers, the prize for a full house followed by the prize for a flush, each per coin bet. So 9/6 means a full house pays 9 and a flush pays 6. Operators trim these two rows more than any other, because a smaller digit is easy to overlook, and every other row is identical in the six tables below.

Each step down has a price. On every £1,000 staked, the house expects to keep £4.56 from a 9/6 table but £27.02 from an 8/5 table, about six times as much. Played at 600 hands an hour and £1 a hand, an 8/5 table costs £16.21 an hour and a 9/6 table £2.74.

One Label, Several Games

The same two digits mean different things in different games. Nine and six describe the best table you can expect in Jacks or Better, yet Double Bonus peaks at 10/7, Double Double Bonus at 10/6 and Triple Double Bonus at 9/7, so a 9/6 version of any of them is already a reduced game.

Read the name of the game first and the digits second. The full-pay table of each version is set out in our guide to the Jacks or Better family.

Where the Paying Hands Begin

Every game has a lowest paying hand. In Jacks or Better it is a pair of jacks, and the rest of the table is built around that choice. Kings or Better Joker Poker needs a pair of kings, while Deuces Wild, where four wild cards make good hands easy to come by, pays nothing below three of a kind. The table lists the share of hands that pay anything, richest first.

Paying on fewer hands does not make a game dearer or cheaper by itself. What counts is how the rest of the table spends its money, so the comparisons in this series always set the return and the swing beside the hit rate.

Five Checks for a Short-Pay Table

A trimmed table looks like the full-pay version with one or two digits lowered. Work through the screen in this order:

1. The five-coin royal flush. A standard game shows 4,000 in that column, the equivalent of 800 for every coin.
2. The full house and flush rows. Compare both with the label of the game you meant to play.
3. The four of a kind rows. Bonus games pay these by rank, so check each one against the full-pay table.
4. Two pair, three of a kind and the straight. These rows sit at the bottom of the table, and few players look twice.
5. The first paying hand. Note where the table starts, whether at a pair of tens, jacks or kings, because that changes how often you win.

Never assume that two lookalike games share a pay table, even inside one lobby. Open the table whenever you start a game, since the screen is the only place that tells you the price. Our video poker hub lists the best-known versions together with the pay table that counts as full pay for each.

Other Guides to Read After the Pay Table

Seven other guides sit alongside this one. They are listed below, and the complete set of video poker guides gathers all eight in one place:

• the video poker beginner’s guide: the buttons, the credit meter and what a licensed site shows you before the first deal.
• 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.
• a tour of the newer video poker games: Ultimate X, Spin Poker, jackpot meters and the optional double up.
• 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.

A Pay Table Names the Price, Not the Result

A pay table lists prizes and cannot predict your next hour. Video poker is entertainment with a cost attached to every hand, and no row, label or version offers a guaranteed profit. Fix a budget before you play, and if it stops being enjoyable, use the tools explained on our safer gambling pages.

Author:

Lucas Portela

Owner, BoldGambler • Avanhandava/SP

Oddsmaker, affiliate and content creator in the iGaming industry.

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