Video poker is a five-card draw poker game played against a fixed pay table instead of a dealer, and unlike a slot machine your choices decide the payback. This free video poker strategy analyzer shows the mathematically optimal way to play any hand and pay table.
Pick your five dealt cards and get the mathematically optimal hold — the exact expected value of every option, computed from first principles. Then drill it in the trainer.
Video poker is a casino game based on five-card draw poker. You are dealt five cards, choose which to keep, and draw replacements for the rest; the final hand is paid according to the machine’s pay table, with no dealer to beat. Because the result depends on which cards you hold, video poker is a game of skill as much as chance — correct decisions raise the long-run return and mistakes lower it.
That is what separates video poker from slots. A slot machine’s return is hidden and fixed no matter how you play, but a video poker machine’s return is set by its posted pay table and can be calculated exactly. On the classic 9/6 Jacks or Better game, perfect play returns about 99.54% (a 0.46% house edge), and a few full-pay tables such as Deuces Wild return over 100%. Reading the pay table before you sit down is the single most important video poker decision you make.
For your dealt hand, the analyzer considers all 32 ways to hold cards. For each one it computes the expected value — the average payout across every possible draw from the remaining 47 cards — and recommends the hold with the highest EV. There is no sampling or guesswork: it is an exact combinatorial calculation, the same math that makes perfect video poker strategy possible.
Scan this list from the top and play the first pattern your dealt hand matches — that is your optimal hold. It captures near-perfect strategy in one ordered list. For the exact best play on any specific hand (including the rare edge cases), use the analyzer above.
Chart order verified against our engine's exact per-hand EV. Deuces Wild uses a different chart — switch the pay table in the analyzer to drill it.
9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54% (house edge 0.46%); NSU Deuces Wild returns 99.73%; and full-pay Deuces Wild actually returns 100.76% to a perfect player. Every figure is computed by our engine over all 2,598,960 deals. See the complete breakdown, pay tables and the math behind each number:
Video poker house edge & RTP by pay table →
| Hand | 9/6 JoB | 9/5 | 8/5 |
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The best video poker strategy is to hold the cards that give the highest expected value on every hand. Our analyzer computes the mathematically optimal hold for any dealt hand and pay table, so you always make the correct play.
On a full-pay machine with perfect strategy the house edge is under half a percent — about 0.46% for 9/6 Jacks or Better and just 0.27% for NSU Deuces Wild.
A few full-pay pay tables such as full-pay Deuces Wild return over 100% with flawless play, but on most machines the house keeps a small edge even with perfect strategy.
Video poker is a five-card draw poker game played on a machine against a pay table. Unlike a slot machine, where the return is hidden and unaffected by your choices, in video poker the cards you hold change the mathematical return — so learning basic strategy directly improves your results.
Payouts are per coin at max-coin play (royal flush pays 800-for-1). Returns assume perfect strategy. 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.54% (house edge 0.46%) — verified by our engine over all 2,598,960 possible deals.
The "9/6" refers to the full-house and flush payouts (9-for-1 and 6-for-1). Every step down — 9/5, 8/5, 8/6 — quietly raises the house edge. Learning to spot the pay table before you play is the single biggest edge in video poker. This is educational content about probability, not gambling advice.