Key facts
- Video poker deals five cards from a virtual 52-card deck; you hold any of them, draw once, and are paid from the posted paytable. Unlike pokies, the return can be calculated from what is on the screen.
- In our exact calculations, perfect strategy returns 99.54% on 9/6 jacks or better and 100.76% on full pay deuces wild. Weaker tables drop to 97.30% (8/5 jacks) and 94.34% (deuces wild with four of a kind at 4).
- The draw is the game: standing pat on every deal returns only 33.7% on 9/6 jacks or better.
- A royal flush comes about once in 40,391 hands with perfect jacks or better play. Over 1,000 hands the chance of seeing even one is about 2.4%.
- Online video poker is a casino game that cannot legally be offered to people in Australia.
What video poker is
Video poker is five card draw on a machine. You press deal and get five cards, choose which to hold, then draw replacements for the rest once. The final five cards are paid from a fixed paytable printed on the screen. No dealer hand, no opponents, no bluffing: just you, a shuffled virtual deck and the table.
That makes video poker unusual among machine games. On a pokie you cannot see how often each symbol lands, so you cannot work out the return from the screen. On video poker you can, because the deck is a known 52 cards. We did exactly that for this guide and its two companion pages: every possible deal, every one of the 32 ways to hold it, and every possible draw.
How a hand plays
- Choose your bet. Our figures assume a full bet, where the royal flush pays 800 for 1.
- Deal. Five cards appear, drawn from a freshly shuffled 52-card deck.
- Hold. Tap the cards you want to keep. You can keep all five or none.
- Draw. Every card you did not hold is replaced from the remaining 47.
- Get paid. If the final hand is on the paytable, you win the listed amount times your coins.
The order of hands is the standard poker order; see poker hand rankings if you need a refresher.
How to read a video poker paytable in ten seconds
Within one game, a few lines of the table carry most of the difference between a good machine and a poor one. Here is what to look for, with our calculated returns for perfect play:
| Game | Line to check | Full pay value | Return | Same game, one line lower | Return |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacks or better | Full house / flush | 9 / 6 | 99.54% | 8 / 5 | 97.30% |
| Deuces wild | Four of a kind | 5 | 100.76% | 4 | 94.34% |
Also check the royal flush at the bet you plan to make: our returns assume it pays 800 for 1 (4,000 coins on five coins). A smaller royal payout means a lower return.
The full set of jacks or better tables, from 9/6 down to 6/5, is on our jacks or better page. The full pay deuces table and its wild card strategy are on deuces wild.
Video poker odds before and after the draw
The deal and the draw are two very different things. Before the draw, your chances are the same as in any five card poker deal. After a perfect draw on 9/6 jacks or better, they look like this:
| Hand | Chance on the deal | Chance after a perfect draw (9/6 jacks) |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 1 in 649,740 | 1 in 40,391 |
| Straight flush | 1 in 72,193 | 1 in 9,148 |
| Four of a kind | 1 in 4,165 | 1 in 423 |
| Full house | 1 in 694 | 1 in 87 |
| Flush | 1 in 509 | 1 in 91 |
| Straight | 1 in 255 | 1 in 89 |
| Three of a kind | 1 in 47 | 1 in 13.4 |
| Two pair | 1 in 21 | 1 in 7.7 |
The draw multiplies your royal chances about sixteen times, because good strategy keeps chasing it. It is also why standing pat on every deal would return only 33.7% on that same machine in our calculation. Almost all of the value is in the hold decisions.
Video poker strategy: what it is worth
A video poker strategy is simply choosing, on each deal, the hold with the highest average payout. We calculated those averages exactly. Three examples from 9/6 jacks or better, in coins returned per coin bet:
- Dealt a flush with four to a royal (A♠ K♠ Q♠ J♠ 3♠): breaking the flush to hold A-K-Q-J is worth 18.43, keeping the flush 6.00.
- Dealt a low pair with four to a straight (5♣ 5♦ 6♠ 7♥ 8♦): the pair is worth 0.82, the straight draw 0.68.
- Dealt nothing but a king (K♦ 9♠ 8♥ 5♦ 2♣): holding the king is worth 0.47, throwing all five away 0.34.
The general rules that come out of the numbers are game-specific, which is why each variant has its own guide. Two apply everywhere: never keep a kicker beside a pair, and always check whether you hold four to a royal before keeping a made hand.
Why video poker results swing
Even the best table hides a lot of variance. In 9/6 jacks or better the royal supplies about 2% of the return, so between royals the game plays closer to a 97.6% return. And royals are rare:
| Hands played | Chance of at least one royal (9/6 jacks, perfect play) |
|---|---|
| 1,000 | 2.4% |
| 10,000 | 21.9% |
| 40,391 | 63.2% |
| 100,000 | 91.6% |
So a session of a few hundred or a few thousand hands will usually run below the long-run figure. That is not the machine being unfair; it is the shape of the paytable.
Pundit tip: treat the published return as the long-run cost of a perfect player, then budget as if you will do worse. At a 99.54% return, $1,000 played costs about $4.56 on average; at 97.30%, about $27.
Video poker, pokies and the law in Australia
In NSW the Gaming Machines Regulation 2019 sets a minimum return of 85% for gaming machines, and Victoria's minimum is also 85%. The best video poker tables, played perfectly, sit far above that: 99.54% or more in our calculations. The difference is that video poker gives that return only to players who make the right holds, and a game's name does not tell you which table it uses. As Victoria's regulator says of poker machines, each result is random and independent of the last; for how that randomness is produced, see our guide to the random number generator.
Online is another matter. Offering online casino games, video poker among them, to people in Australia breaches the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, and there is no licence that allows it. Playing is not an offence for you, but your money sits with an operator outside Australian law. See online poker Australia for the details, and our house edge explainer for how return figures turn into dollars. If video poker is taking more time or money than you planned, help is a call away via our gambling help australia page.
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Frequently asked questions
What is video poker?
A machine version of five card draw. You are dealt five cards, choose which to keep, replace the rest once, and are paid according to the final hand and the machine's paytable. There is no dealer hand to beat.
What are the odds in video poker?
They depend on the game and your strategy. Before the draw, a dealt royal flush is 1 in 649,740. After a perfect draw in 9/6 jacks or better, our calculation gives a royal about 1 in 40,391 hands and a paying hand on 45.5% of hands.
Is video poker better than pokies?
On the best paytables the return is much higher. NSW and Victorian law set minimum returns of 85% for gaming machines, while 9/6 jacks or better returns 99.54% with perfect play in our calculation. The catch is that you only get that return by playing the right strategy on the right table.
What is the best video poker strategy?
Find the best paytable first, then play each hand by its expected value. Key rules from our calculations: keep four to a royal over a made flush, never hold a kicker with a pair, and in deuces wild never discard a deuce.
Is online video poker legal in Australia?
No Australian licence allows it. Online casino games, video poker included, cannot be offered to people in Australia under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001. It is not an offence to play, but offshore sites have no Australian oversight.
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