How to play video poker
Video poker looks like a slot machine and plays like a simplified version of five-card draw poker against no opponent at all. You are trying to make the best five-card hand you can from a single deal and a single chance to swap cards, and the machine pays out according to a fixed table for whatever hand you end up with.
A round starts with a bet and a deal of five cards, all face up on the screen. You choose which cards to hold and which to discard, then the discarded cards are replaced in a single draw. Whatever five-card hand you end up with after that one draw is what gets paid, according to the paytable printed on the machine or in its rules screen.
There is no dealer to beat and no other player at the table; the entire game is you against a fixed payout schedule, decided by which poker hand, if any, you end up holding. A pair of jacks or better is usually the minimum paying hand on the most common variant, Jacks or Better, named for exactly that rule.
Because the outcome depends entirely on which cards you choose to hold, video poker is one of the few casino games where a specific, learnable set of decisions changes your actual return, not just your risk profile. That decision, hold or discard, is made once per hand and is the whole game.
The interface makes this easy to act on in a way a physical poker hand does not: each of the five cards has a “hold” toggle underneath it, you tap or click the ones you want to keep, and the machine automatically deals fresh cards into the rest before paying out. There is no shuffling, no dealer confirming your discards, and no time pressure beyond whatever pace you set for yourself.
The paytable and every hand’s payout
Jacks or Better’s paytable is short and worth memorising in full, because the two numbers in the middle of it, the full house and flush payouts, are the entire difference between a good machine and a mediocre one.
| Hand | 9/6 full pay | 8/5 lower pay |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 800 (at max coins) | 800 (at max coins) |
| Straight flush | 50 | 50 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 25 |
| Full house | 9 | 8 |
| Flush | 6 | 5 |
| Straight | 4 | 4 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 3 |
| Two pair | 2 | 2 |
| Jacks or better (pair) | 1 | 1 |
| Anything less | 0 | 0 |
Every payout except the full house and flush is identical between the two paytables shown, which is precisely why they are easy to overlook: the machine looks the same, the paytable card looks almost the same, and the difference sits in exactly two lines. A 9/6 machine returns 99.54% with correct strategy; an 8/5 machine, changing only those two numbers, returns 97.30%. Some machines drop further still, to 7/5 or 6/5, each step trading more return for a flashier appearance or theme.
Best strategy for video poker
Video poker strategy is a genuine decision chart, closer in spirit to blackjack’s basic strategy than to anything in roulette or craps: for every possible five-card starting hand, there is a mathematically correct choice of which cards to hold, worked out by comparing the expected return of every possible holding pattern against the specific paytable in use.
The chart above ranks holding patterns from strongest to weakest: a made royal flush or straight flush at the top, working down through four-card royal draws, made hands, four-card straight and flush draws, and finally single high cards. When your dealt hand matches more than one pattern on the list, the higher-ranked pattern wins; the skill in video poker is mostly pattern recognition under this ranking, not calculation at the table.
The two decisions that trip up new players most often both involve giving up a made hand for a stronger draw: a four-card royal flush draw is held over an already-made small pair or even a made flush, because the royal flush payout is so much larger than everything below it that the draw’s expected value comes out ahead despite the lower chance of completing it. It feels wrong to break a paying hand; the maths says do it anyway when a four-card royal is on the table.
A second common trap sits lower down the chart: choosing between a low pair (below jacks, so it pays nothing on its own until improved) and a four-card flush or straight draw dealt alongside it. The draw usually wins out for a flush, since a flush’s payout and completion odds together beat a low pair’s chance of becoming two pair, three of a kind or better, but the exact answer depends on which cards are involved, which is why the chart, not a rule of thumb, is the thing worth learning.
The mistakes that cost the most
Playing an 8/5 machine because it is the only one open, without checking the paytable of a machine next to it, is the single most expensive habit in video poker, and it is also the easiest one to fix, since the paytable is printed and visible before you place a single bet.
Betting fewer than max coins on a machine that pays a jackpot-sized royal flush bonus at 5 coins is the second. The jump from 250 to 800 coins per coin bet at max coins on the royal flush specifically means a max-coin bet captures meaningfully more return than four separate max-1-coin bets would, and skipping it for a lower coin count leaves that return on the table.
Holding a low pair over a four-card flush or straight draw, or breaking a made hand for a weaker draw than a four-card royal justifies, is the third. These are the exact decisions the strategy chart exists to settle, and playing by feel rather than the ranking gives back a meaningful slice of the 99.54% return a full-pay machine offers.
Assuming all video poker variants share Jacks or Better’s strategy is the fourth. Deuces Wild, Joker Poker and other variants use entirely different paytables and wild-card rules, which change the correct hold decisions substantially; the chart on this page is built for Jacks or Better specifically.
Chasing a specific hand you have decided you want, rather than the highest expected-value hold available, is the fifth. It is tempting to hold two suited cards toward a flush purely because a flush “feels achievable”, when the chart might call for holding a single high card instead because the overall expected return across all outcomes is better. The correct hold is chosen by comparing every option’s average payout, not by which one feels most likely to land.
Variants and rule differences to watch for
Jacks or Better, described throughout this page, is the standard against which every other video poker variant is usually compared, and the easiest to find a full-pay 9/6 version of online.
Deuces Wild treats every 2 as a wild card, which changes the minimum paying hand (usually three of a kind rather than a pair of jacks) and the entire strategy chart, since wild cards dramatically change which draws are worth chasing. A full-pay Deuces Wild machine can return over 100% with perfect strategy, though most online versions available to recreational players sit below full pay.
Joker Poker adds a single joker to the deck as a wild card and typically pays from a pair of kings or two pair upward depending on the specific paytable; like Deuces Wild, it needs its own strategy chart rather than Jacks or Better’s.
Bonus Poker and Double Bonus Poker increase the payout for four of a kind, particularly four aces, at the cost of a lower full house or flush payout elsewhere in the table, a trade that can suit a player chasing bigger individual wins but generally does not improve overall return compared with a genuinely full-pay Jacks or Better machine.
Playing video poker online in Ireland
Video poker online is exclusively RNG; there is no live-dealer equivalent, since the game has no dealer role to stream in the first place. Every hand is dealt and drawn by a certified random number generator, and the paytable is fixed by the game’s design rather than by anything a casino changes in real time.
Multi-hand versions, playing three, ten or even fifty hands from a single initial deal (your hold decision applies to every hand, each drawing its own replacement cards), are common online and do not change the underlying strategy chart at all: the correct hold for a given five-card starting hand is identical whether one hand or fifty hands follow it. What changes is variance and total stake per round, since fifty hands at once multiplies both the bet and the swings well beyond a single-hand game.
LeoVegas, Betway and 888casino all carry video poker titles among their table-games sections, usually filed under a “video poker” or “poker” category separate from live-casino tables; JackpotCity carries a smaller selection. Check the paytable on any specific title before playing seriously: the 9/6 versus 8/5 distinction applies exactly the same way online as it does on a physical machine, and the game’s info screen will show the full paytable if you look for it.
Since the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, a €10 maximum stake and €3,000 maximum win apply to certain casino-style games once an operator holds an Irish gambling licence; those licences are expected from 2027, so current stake limits on MGA- and UKGC-licensed sites are set by the operator rather than by Irish law.
What an hour of video poker actually costs
At a full-pay 9/6 machine’s 0.46% house edge, a €1-per-coin, 5-coin (€5 total) max-coin bet played roughly 500 hands an hour on a fast online machine costs, on average, about €11.50 an hour (0.46% × €5 × 500). The same bet and pace on an 8/5 machine, at 2.70%, costs roughly €67.50 an hour, nearly six times worse for identical bets, purely because two numbers on the paytable changed.
Playing correct strategy rather than instinct on the same 9/6 machine typically closes several tenths of a percentage point of gap on its own; playing badly on a good paytable can easily cost as much as playing well on a mediocre one. Run your own stake and pace through the house edge calculator before settling on a session budget, and check the paytable before the stake.
Video poker’s variance is higher than its low house edge might suggest, since most of the return comes from rare, large payouts like the royal flush rather than a steady trickle of small wins, so a session can run well below or above the average for a long stretch before the numbers catch up.