Jacks or Better Video Poker: Pay Table and Strategy

Jacks or Better is a five-card draw poker game. You are dealt five cards from a fresh 52-card deck, choose which to keep, and replace the rest once from the same deck. The result is paid according to a fixed table, and the lowest paying hand is a pair of Jacks or better. It is the clearest example of a game where skill matters: the cards are random, but which cards you hold changes your average return. This guide gives the pay table, the value of each kind of hold, and the cost of getting it wrong.

How a hand plays

1. You place a bet and are dealt five cards.
2. You tap the cards you want to hold. Every card you do not hold is discarded.
3. The discarded cards are replaced from the rest of the deck, one draw only.
4. Your final five cards are scored against the pay table.

The deck is a fresh shuffled 52 cards each hand, so there is no memory from hand to hand and cards you discard cannot come back. The deck is drawn on the server, and a hand is decided at the draw: the cards that would replace your discards are fixed before you choose. Which cards you hold changes your odds. The order you tap does not.

The pay table

Cashout Arcade's table has the shape of the common 8/5 Jacks or Better table: 8 for a full house and 5 for a flush. The numbers below are total returns per coin bet (the table is "for 1", so a Jacks or Better pays back your stake):

The standard 8/5 table returns 97.30% with perfect play, according to the Wizard of Odds pay table list (9/6, the best common table, returns 99.54%). Cashout Arcade starts from the 8/5 shape and scales every pay above Jacks or Better by 0.9961, keeping Jacks or Better at exactly 1x, so that perfect play returns exactly 97% like every other game. Pairs of Jacks, Queens, Kings and Aces count; a straight can use the ace high or low.

How often you are dealt each hand

The five-card hands you are dealt follow simple counting, and they explain why you keep chasing:

About one deal in five is already a paying hand (20.6% of deals). Half of all deals contain nothing, and most of the game is deciding what to draw to.

Which cards to hold

The best hold for any hand is the one with the highest average return, and the values below come from calculating every possible draw for each choice, using Cashout Arcade's exact pay table. Each value is the average total return per 1-coin bet (so 1.00 is breaking even for that hand).

(The cards are written with ♥ hearts, ♦ diamonds, ♣ clubs, ♠ spades. A "hold" always means the cards you tap; everything else is replaced.)

Read the table for the patterns. Ordered by average return, the big decisions run roughly like this:

1. Four to a royal flush, even over a made flush or straight.
2. Any made hand of a straight or better (they already pay 3.98 or more), and three of a kind (4.2).
3. Four to an open straight flush (3.4).
4. Two pair (2.5).
5. A pair of Jacks or better (1.5).
6. Three to a royal flush (1.4 to 1.5), which beats a low pair.
7. Four to a flush (1.0).
8. A low pair (0.8).
9. Open-ended four to a straight (0.7).
10. Three to a straight flush, suited high cards, other high cards, and last of all discarding everything (0.35 to 0.6).

The order shifts a little with the exact cards, so treat the numbers as the guide rather than the rank. Four to a royal flush is the single most valuable draw, because only one card in 47 completes it but it pays about 800 times the bet. This is why you break a made flush to chase it.

Outs: how likely is a draw to complete?

After you hold four cards, one card is drawn from the remaining 47:

Four to a flush is a better draw than four to a straight because it has more outs and pays more.

Common mistakes

• Keeping a kicker with a pair. Holding J J plus a 9 returns 1.40 on average, against 1.52 for the pair alone: you give up about 12% of the bet for nothing.
• Holding a low pair with a high card. With 4♥ 4♦ A♥, the pair alone returns 0.81 and the pair plus the ace 0.66.
• Keeping a made flush instead of four to a royal. The flush returns 4.98; breaking it for the royal draw returns 18.14.
• Chasing a single low card. Holding one ten returns 0.32 against 0.35 for a full redraw.
• Believing in streaks. The deck is reshuffled every hand; a hand that follows a dry spell is no more likely to be good. See the streaks guide.

RTP and why best play matters

With the best hold on every hand, Cashout Arcade's poker returns exactly 97%. The skill is the only reason it can reach that figure: weaker holds return less, and the cost of one mistake adds up the more you play. Typical slips cost between 3% and 15% of a bet (see the table above), and wrongly breaking a royal draw costs far more, which is why small mistakes add up faster than the 3% edge itself.

The game gives you no way to exceed 97%. There is no counting, no side bet and no pay-table shopping: the table is fixed, so the best you can do is make every hold correct. Good play lowers what the game costs. It does not turn it into a profit. The house edge guide explains the arithmetic, and the Odds page lists the rule that Poker's return assumes the best holds.

You can try it in the Poker game.