Video Poker Strategy and Common Mistakes

Master video poker strategy: learn the 16-step Jacks or Better chart, avoid costly hold mistakes, and see exact math values per hand.

Strategy is the part of video poker you control. This guide explains what optimal play means, shows what a perfect hold looks like across every possible deal, gives a 16-step order of preference for 9/6 Jacks or Better that earns almost the full return, works through hands where the obvious play is wrong, prices the common mistakes with exact numbers and says plainly what strategy cannot do.

What Optimal Strategy Means

For every deal there are 32 possible holds, from keeping nothing to keeping all five cards. Optimal strategy picks, for each deal, the hold with the highest average payout over every possible draw. On 9/6 Jacks or Better that earns 99.54%. The word average matters: the best hold can lose on any single hand, and a worse hold can win, so strategy is judged over millions of hands, not over the next one. Its job is to stop you giving return away, not to win the hand in front of you.

Two things never enter the calculation. The best hold depends only on the five cards you are dealt and the pay table, not on how your last hand went, how long you have played or how much is left in your balance. And it changes with the pay table, because a row that pays more makes the cards that lead to it worth more.

What a Perfect Hold Looks Like

Across all 2,598,960 starting hands, the best hold on 9/6 Jacks or Better keeps a different number of cards depending on the deal. The table shows how often each hold size is best.

Two-card holds dominate, because pairs and combinations of two high cards decide most deals. Keeping all five cards is right only 0.7% of the time, and 20.6% of deals already pay something before the draw. Most of the skill is in choosing between small holds, which is why a ranked list works so well.

A 16-Step Order of Preference for 9/6 Jacks or Better

Read down the list and keep the cards in the first line that matches your five. A high card is a jack, queen, king or ace. An outside straight draw is four cards in a row that can be completed at either end, such as 5, 6, 7 and 8, which need a 4 or a 9. Played exactly, the list returns 99.46%, close to the 99.54% of perfect play. It is the simple strategy that the Wizard of Odds publishes for this pay table, and we checked its return by exact count.

The list is a simplification. It differs from the best hold in 2.3% of deals and gives up 0.08 percentage points, about one bet in every 1,181 hands, which is $0.63 an hour at $1.25 a hand and 600 hands an hour. Dealt A♠ K♦ Q♣ J♥ 9♠, for example, the list keeps the jack and the queen for 0.48 per coin bet, while the best hold keeps all four high cards for 0.60. That small a cost is the reason a learnable list is worth using.

Hands Where the Obvious Play Is Wrong

Some holds feel wrong until you see the numbers. Each row shows a 9/6 Jacks or Better deal, the best hold, the alternative that tempts people and the average value of each, per coin bet.

The rows share a pattern. A draw to the royal flush beats almost everything because the top prize is so large, which is why four cards to a royal flush beats even a made flush. A draw to a flush or to a royal beats a low pair because a low pair pays nothing by itself and the draw has a bigger prize in reach. In Jacks or Better the extra card you keep reduces the cards you draw, so a spare ace beside a pair of jacks costs value instead of adding it, and the kicker never helps the pair.

What Mistakes Cost

Most mistakes in video poker come from the game you choose or the settings you leave on, not from the hold. Priced for 9/6 Jacks or Better unless stated, the common ones are:

• Playing a short-pay table. 8/5 instead of 9/6 raises the expected cost from $4.56 to $27.02 for every $1,000 wagered.
• Betting fewer than five coins. With the royal flush paying 250 for each coin the return falls from 99.54% to 98.37%, an expected cost of $16.27 for every $1,000.
• Never breaking a made flush or straight. Always keeping them returns 99.43%, about 0.1 percentage points below perfect play.
• Playing the 16-step list instead of the best hold. It returns 99.46%, a cost of 0.08 percentage points.
• Using one game’s chart on another game, which can cost far more than any of the others, as the next table shows.

The table shows what happens when the best hold for 9/6 Jacks or Better is used on other games. Differences are in percentage points of the return.

The Jacks or Better chart is nearly perfect on Bonus Poker and Aces and Faces, which keep its shape, and then fails quickly as the pay table moves away from it. On Triple Double Bonus 9/7 it turns a 99.58% game into a 97.15% game, and on Deuces Wild it collapses to 61.71%. Before you play a new game, find the strategy for that game and pay table. Our guides to Double Bonus and the other bonus games and wild card video poker show how the holds move.

What Strategy Cannot Do

Strategy cannot change the pay table. The best possible player on 8/5 Jacks or Better still faces an expected cost of 2.70% of every dollar wagered. Nor can strategy make a session profitable: perfect play on 9/6 finishes a 600-hand hour ahead only 36.6% of the time, as our guide to hours and bankrolls shows.

It also cannot read patterns. Every hand starts from a freshly shuffled deck, so the last hand says nothing about the next one, no royal flush is due, and tracking past cards gives no information. Betting systems fail for the same reason: the game keeps a fixed share of the total amount wagered, and raising or lowering the bet after a win or a loss changes how much you wager, not the share the game keeps.

Further Video Poker Guides

This guide is one of eight in the video poker hub. Seven more cover the rest of the game, from the first deal to the rules:

• how video poker works: one hand from bet to payout, what five coins buy and what an hour at the machine costs.
• the pay table guide: which rows to check, how to spot a short-pay game and where the return comes from.
• popular Jacks or Better variants: side-by-side returns and swings for the best-known pay tables.
• Deuces Wild and Joker Poker: how wild cards change the pay table, the swings and the hands worth holding.
• the multi-hand video poker guide: Triple Play to Hundred Play, with the swing per deal worked out.
• how video poker volatility works: swing per hand, the royal flush effect and sensible stake sizes.
• how US regulators handle video poker: state licensing, testing labs and where land-based machines fit in.

Better Holds Still Have a Cost

Good strategy lowers the cost of video poker, but it does not remove it. The game remains paid entertainment with an expected cost on every hand, and no chart, system or streak can promise a profit. Pick a budget and a time limit before you deal, and use the deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion tools described on our responsible gaming page.

Author:

Lucas Portela

Owner, BoldGambler • Avanhandava/SP

Oddsmaker, affiliate and content creator in the iGaming industry.

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