Every strategy chart, trainer answer and house-edge figure on this site is produced by deterministic mathematics — not scraped from operators, not supplied by affiliates, and not estimated. This page explains exactly how our numbers are made, how we validate them against published results, and how we label the difference between what our engines compute and what we cite from established analysis. Accuracy is the entire point of the site, so the method is public.
A casino strategy site is only worth as much as its numbers, and numbers can come from very different places. Ours come from one place: the rules of each game. For every game we cover, the optimal play and the house edge are properties of the pay table and the rules, and both can be derived by working through the probabilities directly. Where we can run that derivation exhaustively in code, we do, and we mark the result as engine-verified. Where a full custom solver would be disproportionate, we rely on the established combinatorial analysis that has been published and cross-checked for decades — and we label those figures as published rather than pretending we computed them ourselves.
Three things we never do: we do not scrape live data from casinos or aggregators, we do not accept numbers from affiliate programs or operators, and we do not generate statistics with a language model. A house edge is a mathematical fact about a set of rules; it does not need a data feed, and it must not be invented. Keeping that line clean is what lets the tools double as reference material.
Video poker is the clearest example of computing rather than estimating. A hand of draw video poker has exactly 2,598,960 possible five-card deals. Our engine walks every one of them, evaluates all 32 ways to hold or discard, keeps the hold with the highest expected value under the game's pay table, and averages that optimal return across all deals. The result is the exact return to player, from which the house edge follows as 100% minus the RTP.
Because the calculation is exhaustive rather than sampled, it is exact — and it agrees with the published figures to the fourth decimal, which is the strongest check available:
| Video poker game | Our engine — RTP | House edge | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 Jacks or Better | 99.5439% | 0.4561% | 99.54% ✓ |
| NSU Deuces Wild | 99.7283% | 0.2717% | 99.7282% ✓ |
Getting there honestly meant catching our own mistakes. Our first Deuces Wild run came out at 99.4569% — visibly wrong against the published 99.73%. Rather than fudge it, we brute-force diffed our hand-category counts against the known reference distribution and found the cause: the wild-card evaluator was not counting the A-2-3-4-5 "wheel" as a straight, because in Deuces the ace plays both high and low. Once the ace was allowed to play low, every category frequency matched the reference exactly and the RTP landed on 99.7283%, one ten-thousandth off the published 99.7282% — the difference being rounding, not method. That kind of adversarial self-check is the standard we hold every engine to.
For the table games, we are explicit about which part of each number is our own exact computation and which part is established published analysis. Being honest about that boundary matters more than claiming everything is ours.
No engine ships until it passes independent checks. We use three, in layers:
When a check fails, we diff our way to the cause rather than tune a number until it looks right — the Deuces wheel bug above is exactly how that process is supposed to work.
Across the site you will see house-edge tables where some rows are marked "our engine ✓" and others say "published." The distinction is deliberate and consistent: an engine-verified figure is one our own code computes exactly for that pay table, and a published figure is an established result from standard combinatorial analysis that we cite. We never dress a published number up as our own computation, and we never present an approximation without saying it is one. When a game has variants our engine does not yet solve exactly — for example bonus pay tables with rank-based four-of-a-kind bonuses — we say that openly and give the published rules instead of inventing an exact chart.
For the figures we label as published, we rely on the established combinatorial analysis of casino games — the standard, long-cross-checked probability treatments of each game's rules and pay tables, of the kind documented in the widely used house-edge references for casino table games. For everything marked engine-verified, the "source" is the enumeration itself: the code, the rules and the pay table, which anyone with the same inputs can reproduce. We are aggregating the exact outputs of our validated engines into a public technical dataset so the engine-verified figures can be inspected and reused directly.
Because accuracy is the whole reason the site exists, we treat every reported error seriously. If you believe any strategy cell, probability or house-edge figure here is wrong, tell us at info@casino-strategy-lab.com — a concrete report of a specific number is the most valuable feedback we can get, and corrections are published as soon as they are verified.
The strategy and house-edge engines behind CasinoStrategyLab were built and validated in-house. The siteâs guides and this methodology are written and edited by Zavian Thornell, an iGaming writer and content specialist who has covered casino games, game analysis and RTP across the industry since 2015. The engines, the validation and the editorial standard described here are the same across every game we cover.
No. Every strategy and house-edge figure comes from deterministic mathematics — either computed by our own engines directly from the rules and pay table, or an established published figure that we label as such. We do not scrape operators, we take no data from affiliates, and we do not use AI-generated statistics.
A figure marked "our engine" or "engine-verified" is computed exactly by our own code, usually by enumerating every possible outcome. Figures without that label are established published results from standard combinatorial analysis of the game, which we cite rather than claim as our own computation.
For our video poker games the house edge is exact to four decimals because we enumerate all 2,598,960 possible deals and average the optimal return. For other games we combine exact evaluators where we built them with published combinatorial analysis of the rules, and we never present an estimate as an exact computation.
All figures reflect correct or optimal play under common US rules; specific pay tables and table rules shift the exact numbers. Educational content about probability, not gambling advice.