Online Video Poker
Video poker deals five cards, lets you keep or discard each one, and pays out from a table printed above the cards before you ever see a hand. That table is the entire game: two machines with the same name and the same cards on screen can return very different amounts over time, and the only difference between them is the numbers in that table.
That also makes this the one game on the site with a genuine skill component. A correct hold is worked out from the pay table rather than guessed at, and the gap between it and a plausible-looking wrong one is real money over a session. Every variant below deals five-card draw at its core — Jacks or Better is the baseline, and every other name on this page changes exactly one thing about it: which cards are wild, or which four-of-a-kind pays a bonus.
How Every Hand Pays, on the Reference Pay Table
Figures for full-pay Jacks or Better — the 9/6 pay table, 99.54% under optimal play and the industry's own reference point. The name comes from exactly two of these rows: a 9/6 machine pays 9 credits on a full house and 6 on a flush, and every other row is fixed across the whole Jacks or Better family. Drop either number and the return drops with it — an 8/5 table returns 97.30%, and 6/5 all the way down to 95%.
Nine Ways to Deal the Same Five Cards
All American, Aces and Faces and several rarer bonus families are in the catalogue too, in smaller numbers today — pages for them arrive as it grows.
Why the Same Two Numbers Decide Everything
Every pay table quoted on this site is read from the machine itself and matched against Wizard of Odds' verified figures, never estimated — the same discipline behind every number on this page.
Play Video Poker Free
Every video poker game here runs in demo mode: no signup, no deposit, no download. The pay table on screen is the one the real-money version uses — what is missing is the money, in both directions.
That makes free play worth something specific here more than almost anywhere else on the site: it is how you read a pay table and confirm which variant you are looking at before a single credit is real. Start with these four, or browse every free video poker game on the site.
Video Poker FAQs
Full-pay Jacks or Better — the 9/6 table — at 99.54% under optimal play, the reference figure the whole industry cites (Wizard of Odds). Deuces Wild has a full-pay schedule that goes further still, into player-favourable territory under perfect strategy, but it is far rarer to find.
Both, and unlike a slot the skill half is real. The cards you are dealt are random, but which of them to keep is a decision with a mathematically correct answer for a given pay table — worked out once and never guessed at. Playing that answer correctly is what the return figures on this page assume; playing every hand on instinct gives up several percentage points of it.
The two numbers are what a full house and a flush pay per credit bet. A 9/6 machine pays 9 credits on a full house and 6 on a flush; every cheaper pay table lowers one or both of those two numbers and leaves every other hand's payout the same.
Not automatically. A wild card makes strong hands far more common, so the pay table is rebuilt around that — the minimum paying hand rises, and the whole ladder is recalculated to keep the game's return where the operator wants it. A wild-card game can return more than a non-wild one under the right pay table, or noticeably less under a stripped-down one; the pay table decides, not the presence of a wild card.
Yes, in every way that decides the outcome — same deck, same pay table, same odds. The demo credits simply cannot be withdrawn. That makes it useful for exactly one thing: confirming a machine's pay table and variant before you stake anything on it.
A pay table that pays extra on specific four-of-a-kind hands — aces, or aces and low cards, depending on the exact variant — funded by lower payouts elsewhere, usually on two pair or the full house and flush. The trade-off is real: a bonus game is not simply a better version of Jacks or Better, it redistributes the same return toward rarer hands and away from common ones.
Three Things Players Believe About the Cards
This Machine Is 'Hot' or 'Due' for a Jackpot
A machine that has not paid a royal flush in a while is more likely to pay one soon.
Reality Check
Every hand is dealt from a freshly and independently shuffled virtual deck. Nothing about the previous hand — or the previous thousand — changes the odds of the next one. A royal flush is exactly as likely on the very next hand as it was on the last one, whatever has or has not happened in between.
Switching Machines Resets Your Luck
A cold machine can be escaped by moving to a different one.
Reality Check
Two machines running the same pay table return exactly the same percentage over time — moving between them changes nothing about your odds. What genuinely changes your odds is moving to a machine with a BETTER pay table, which has nothing to do with which seat you were just sitting in.
Any Reasonable Hold Is About as Good as Any Other
Keeping the obviously good cards and discarding the rest is close enough to optimal.
Reality Check
This is the belief that costs the most money in this family specifically, because — unlike a slot spin or a roulette bet — the hold really is a decision with a correct answer for the pay table in front of you. A believable but wrong hold gives up a measurable slice of the return quoted on this page, hand after hand, all session long.