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, not estimated. This page explains how our numbers are made, how we validate them, and how we label the difference between what our engines compute and what we cite from established analysis.
A casino strategy site is only worth as much as its numbers. 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 mark the result 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 label those figures as published rather than pretending we computed them. Three things we never do: scrape live data from casinos or aggregators, accept numbers from affiliates or operators, or 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.
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, 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:
| 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% — rounding, not method. That 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 is established published analysis:
No engine ships until it passes three independent checks, 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 meant to work. Across the site, house-edge tables mark some rows "our engine ✓" and others "published": the first is computed exactly by our code for that pay table, the second is an established result we cite. When a game has variants our engine does not yet solve exactly — such as bonus pay tables with rank-based four-of-a-kind bonuses — we say so and give the published rules instead of inventing an exact chart.
For figures labelled published we rely on the standard, long-cross-checked combinatorial treatments of each game's rules and pay tables. For everything engine-verified, the "source" is the enumeration itself — the code, the rules and the pay table, which anyone with the same inputs can reproduce. 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 is wrong, tell us at info@casino-strategy-lab.com, and corrections are published as soon as they are verified. The engines were built and validated in-house; the 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 since 2015.
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.