Video Poker (Jacks or Better): Odds and Payouts

Video poker is a one-player poker game. You are dealt five cards, choose which to hold, and the rest are replaced once. Your final five-card hand is paid according to a fixed pay table. The game is named Poker in the app and it is Jacks or Better: the lowest winning hand is a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces.

Coins are virtual and have no cash value. Your holds decide your return, so this is a game where skill matters, like Blackjack: How It Works, Odds and Payouts.

How a round works

1. Place your bet. Five cards are dealt from a fresh, shuffled 52-card deck.
2. Tap the cards you want to hold.
3. Draw. The cards you did not hold are replaced from the rest of the same deck.
4. The final hand is paid by the table below. There is one draw only.

The deck is shuffled on our servers for every hand, and the replacement cards are fixed before you choose, so the timing of your tap changes nothing.

The pay table (8/5 Jacks or Better)

The multipliers are the total returned for your bet, including the stake. Jacks or Better is an exact push at 1x. The higher hands use the usual "8/5" Jacks or Better pay table (a full house pays 8 and a flush 5, per bet of 1) scaled slightly so that best play returns 97%.

Aces count high or low in a straight. The unscaled 8/5 table returns 97.2984% with best play and returns Jacks or Better on 21.46% of hands; the game scales the higher pays slightly down to hit 97%. The odds page explains the shared limits and the best-play assumption.

Your holds decide your return

The 97% return assumes you hold the best cards on every hand; any other play returns less. You can see how a decision is valued by working out the average payout of each hold. These are exact averages from the game's own deck and pay table, for the specific hands shown.

Three lessons stand out. First, a low pair is worth less than four cards to a flush, because a pair of 3s does not qualify as Jacks or Better and pays nothing until it improves. Second, keeping a "kicker" with a pair (the 2 in row 2) lowers your average, because it leaves one fewer card to draw to three of a kind or a full house. Third, when you have no pair and no draw, keeping your high cards beats redrawing all five.

A worked example

You bet 100 coins and are dealt J♥ J♠ 2♣ 5♦ 9♠. You hold the pair and draw three cards. The chances of each final hand are exact: you finish with a pair of jacks only (1x) 71.3% of the time, two pair 16.0% (1.99x), three of a kind 11.4% (2.98x), a full house 1.0% (7.96x) and four of a kind 0.28% (24.90x). That averages about 152 coins returned on your 100 stake, which is why a high pair is among the best starting hands. The same 100 coins on a dealt hand with nothing worth keeping averages only 31 to 34 coins when you redraw all five.

Max win and caps

The largest payout is a royal flush at 796.85x. That is well under the game-wide limits of 50,000x the bet and 250,000,000 coins per round, and a royal flush is very rare.

A simple set of holds that works

These are general guidelines, not a complete strategy; the averages in the table above are exact for the hands shown.

• Keep a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces, and keep three of a kind (the three fives above average 4.22x). With two pair, keep both pairs.
• Four cards to a royal flush beats a dealt flush or straight: 19.45x on average against 4.98x or 3.98x.
• Four cards to a flush beats a low pair.
• With no pair and no draw, keep jacks, queens, kings or aces rather than drawing five new cards.
• Never keep a kicker with a pair.

What is the same as other table games

Video Poker shares the 97% target with Baccarat: How It Works, Odds and Payouts and Blackjack: How It Works, Odds and Payouts, but only Blackjack and Video Poker reward good decisions. A full guide to the pay table and the common mistakes is in Jacks or Better Video Poker: Pay Table and Strategy; for luck versus skill in these games see Skill vs Chance in Arcade and Casino-Style Games.

Tips that hold up

• Your holds are the only skill here. The shuffle and the draw are fixed by chance.
• A winning hand is not always a good bet. Jacks or Better returns exactly your bet and counts as a push.
• Do not chase the royal. It is worth only if the cards you hold are already four to a royal.
• Perfect play still loses 3% over time. It removes avoidable mistakes, not the house edge.

Play with limits

Hands are quick and the draw feels close, so it is easy to lose track of the number of hands you have played. Set a limit before you start and see Play Safely in Cashout Arcade: Limits and Breaks for tools. Cashout Arcade is for adults aged 18+, uses virtual coins and has no real-money prizes.