How to Play Video Poker: Rules, Strategy & Beginner Tips

Video poker machines are mostly found in casinos next to slots on the floor. They are similar in appearance, they work the same, and they even have similar coin slots. To a casual observer, they are the same game. But they’re not. Slots are mechanical games, and all you have to do is press a key and hope that a random number generator produces a result. Video poker, by contrast, deals you an actual hand of five cards and then lets you decide which to keep.

A slot machine might return 92 cents on the dollar no matter how you play it. A video poker machine with the right paytable, played with the right holds, can return 99.5 cents. Some variants tip past 100%, which means the player has the edge. You will not find that anywhere else on the casino floor except maybe a blackjack table with perfect card counting. And nobody is going to ask you to leave for using a strategy chart at a video poker machine.

Video Poker Rules – Five Cards, One Decision, No Opponents

The whole game fits into five steps. You could teach someone during a commercial break.

• Pick your bet. Coin size times number of coins. Machines take one to five coins per hand. Five matters – we will explain why later.

• Hit Deal. Five cards appear on screen. They come from a standard 52-card deck, shuffled fresh each hand.

• Decide what to hold. Tap the cards worth keeping. Leave the rest. This is the only moment in the entire hand where your brain matters.

• Hit Draw. The machine swaps out your discards for new cards pulled from the 47 remaining in that same deck.

• Get paid or don’t. Your final five cards either match something on the video poker paytable posted on the screen, or they do not.

No other players. No dealer staring you down. No pot to calculate. Just you, five cards, and a payout chart. The whole thing takes maybe 20 seconds per hand, which is part of the danger – 500 hands can blow past in under an hour.

Video Poker Winning Hands – What Beats What

The hand rankings follow standard poker. If you have ever played a home game or watched the World Series of Poker on TV, you already know most of this. The difference in video poker games online is not which hands win – it is how much each one pays, and that varies by machine.

Here is the standard ranking with rough odds for Jacks or Better under optimal play, based on figures published by the Wizard of Odds:

In Jacks or Better, any hand lower than a pair of jacks is a loser. A pair of tens or a pair of nines is worthless. This can be confusing for beginners coming from regular poker, where any pair has at least some value.

Which Video Poker Variant Should You Actually Play

There are dozens of variants. Most casinos carry at least four or five. The video poker rules stay the same across all of them – deal, hold, draw – but the paytables and wild card rules shift enough to change the strategy completely. Let’s look at some common variants:

• Jacks or Better is where everyone should start. No wilds, no bonus gimmicks. Pair of jacks or higher wins, everything else loses. The full-bet game (where a standard bet is one full unit, owing to the full house being the game’s baseline bet of 9 coins and the flush 6) is a 9/6 version and has a 99.54% return with perfect play. That figure is from the Wizard of Odds, and it’s been independently verified for decades. Practically no casino games come that close to breaking even.

• Deuces Wild makes all four twos into wild cards. Sounds great until you see the paytable – minimum paying hand jumps to three of a kind. The math works out better than Jacks or Better if you find a full-pay machine (100.76% RTP), but full-pay Deuces Wild is rare. Most machines commonly found in casinos pay 3-4% worse.

• Bonus Poker and Double Bonus throw extra money at four-of-a-kind hands. Four aces on Double Bonus can pay 800 coins. Payouts have been reduced on smaller hands to fund those bonuses, which the house describes as making the game more volatile. Longer dry spells between wins, bigger spikes when they come.

• Joker Poker adds a 53rd card. The minimum winning hand is usually two pair or kings. The strategy shifts enough that a Jacks or Better chart will steer you wrong.

One of the main tips on how to play video poker for beginners is to pick Jacks or Better 9/6 and not touch anything else until the holds feel automatic. Seriously. The strategy charts for other variants assume you already know the baseline.

Video Poker Strategy – The Holds That Actually Matter

Here is the thing about video poker that separates it from every slot machine ever built: your choices move the needle. Play randomly, and the RTP drops into the low 90s – worse than most slots. Follow a correct video poker strategy chart, and it climbs to 99.5% or higher.

The gap between random play and optimal play on a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine is around 5 to 7 percentage points. Over a thousand hands at $1.25 per hand, that difference is $60 to $90 in expected losses versus expected losses of less than $6. Real money.

Strategy charts rank every possible hold from best to worst. You look at your five cards, find the highest-ranking option on the chart, and hold those cards. Print it out, and tape it to the machine if you want. Nobody cares.

The priority list for 9/6 Jacks or Better, simplified:

• Made hands first. Got a straight, a flush, a full house? Hold all five. Do not get creative.

• Three of a kind. Hold the trips, ditch the other two.

• Two pairs. Keep both, draw one card, hoping for the full house.

• High pair (jacks through aces). Hold the pair, throw away three.

• Four to a flush. One card short of five same-suit cards. Toss the odd one out.

• Low pair. A pair of fours beats holding a single ace in expected value terms. Most beginners get this wrong.

• Four to an outside straight. Open-ended, like 7-8-9-10. Chase it.

• Two suited high cards. Keep a suited king-queen and draw three.

• Single high card. Last resort – hold one jack, queen, king, or ace. Dump the rest.

• Nothing usable. Draw all five. It happens.

The simplified chart from the Wizard of Odds costs you about 0.08% compared to perfect play – that is, one total bet every 1,178 hands. Close enough for anyone who is not playing professionally.

Video Poker RTP and Odds

RTP means Return to Player. It is the percentage of every dollar wagered that the machine gives back over time. In slots, the casino sets the RTP, and you cannot change it. In a video poker game, RTP depends on two things: the paytable and your decisions. You control one of those completely, and the other by choosing which machine to sit at.

Full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better: 99.54% RTP with perfect play. Drop the full house payout from 9 to 8, and the RTP falls to about 98.39%. Drop both the full house and the flush (8/5 table), and it sinks to around 97.30%.

Over 10,000 hands at five coins per hand, the difference between 9/6 and 8/5 is hundreds of dollars. The machines look the same. The buttons are the same. The difference is three lines on the paytable.

Video poker odds by variant, full-pay versions with perfect strategy:

• 9/6 Jacks or Better – 99.54%

• Full-pay Deuces Wild – 100.76% (player has the edge)

• 10/7 Double Bonus – 100.17%

• 9/6 Double Double Bonus – 98.98%

• 8/5 Bonus Poker – 99.17%

Bad strategy makes it worse. A player on a 9/6 machine making random holds might effectively play at 94-95% RTP. A player on an 8/5 machine with perfect strategy plays at 97.3%. The person on the better machine with worse play actually loses more money per hand. Strategy and paytable work together. One without the other is not enough.

Max Coins in Video Poker

Most machines scale payouts proportionally from 1 coin to 4 coins. Bet two coins on a full house at 9/6, get 18 coins. Bet three, get 27. Straight math. But the fifth coin triggers a royal flush bonus. At four coins, a royal pays 1,000 (250 per coin times 4). At five coins, it pays 4,000. Not 1,250. Four thousand.

That bonus accounts for roughly 2% of the total RTP. Playing with four coins instead of five on 9/6 Jacks or Better drops the return from 99.54% to about 98.01%. You are voluntarily handing the casino an extra 1.5% edge. If five coins at a dollar denomination is too expensive, move to a quarter machine and bet five quarters. Same total strategy, lower stakes, full RTP.

Video Poker Bankroll Management – Staying Alive Long Enough for the Math to Work

Hands are fast. Bets add up. A quarter machine at max coins runs $1.25 per hand, and you can easily play 400-500 hands per hour. That is $500 to $625 cycled through the machine in sixty minutes. Even at 99.5% RTP, variance can eat your session bankroll before the long-run math has any chance to kick in:

• Bring 200-300 max-coin bets per session. At $1.25 per hand, that is $250 to $375.

• Do not reload. When the session budget is gone, walk away. Come back tomorrow or next week.

• Step away every 20-30 minutes. Tired players are more likely to hold the wrong cards. Wrong holds cost money.

• Write down the results. A note on your phone takes five seconds and keeps you honest about how the sessions actually went.

Royal flushes are where a big chunk of your theoretical return lives, and they show up once every 40,000 hands. That means most individual sessions end without one. Budget accordingly – the math works, but it works slowly.

Mistakes That Cost Real Money in Video Poker

Sitting at the wrong machine. An 8/5 Jacks or Better machine has a 2.2% worse RTP than a 9/6 sitting three feet away. Check the paytable first. Pay attention to the following:

• Breaking a flush to chase a royal. Only do this if you have four to a royal. Breaking a made flush to chase three cards toward a royal flush is almost always wrong.

• Holding a kicker. Got three of a kind plus a queen? Throw away the queen and the other card. Three of a kind plus two fresh draws beats three of a kind plus a queen and one fresh draw every time.

• Betting fewer than five coins. That 2% royal flush bonus is not optional if you care about your return.

• Using the wrong strategy chart. Deuces Wild strategy on a Jacks or Better machine will lose you money. Every variant has its own chart. Match the chart to the game.

Playing without any chart at all. Gut instinct is not a strategy. The math is published. Use it.

FAQs

Is video poker skill or luck?

The deal is random, but which cards you hold after the deal changes your expected return by 5-7 percentage points. Over hundreds of hands, that is a lot of money. Skill does not guarantee you win any single hand, but it guarantees you lose less over time.

What is the best video poker game for beginners?

9/6 Jacks or Better. The strategy is documented to death, the variance is manageable, and the 99.54% RTP with correct play is hard to beat anywhere on the casino floor. Learn this game first, branch out later.

Is video poker beatable?

Full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.76% with perfect strategy. 10/7 Double Bonus returns 100.17%. Those are real player edges. Finding the machines is the hard part – casinos know the math too, and full-pay versions are getting scarcer. But they exist, particularly downtown Vegas and in some online casinos.

Should you always play max coins?

Yes. The royal flush payout at five coins is not proportional – it pays 4,000 instead of 1,250. Skipping that bonus drops your RTP by about 2%. If you cannot afford five coins at your denomination, drop to a cheaper machine and play five coins there.

How is video poker different from table poker?

No opponents. No bluffing. No pot odds, no position, no reads. You play against a paytable, not against other people. The strategy is purely mathematical – which hold pattern gives the highest expected value for this specific five-card deal?

Can you play video poker online?

Yes, and in some ways it is better. Online casinos often display the RTP directly, which takes the guesswork out of finding a good paytable. The rules and math are identical to physical machines. Some sites also offer video poker free-play versions, which are useful for practicing strategy without risking money.

How to win at video poker?

Pick a full-pay machine. Play max coins. Follow the strategy chart for your specific variant on every single hand. That is the entire secret. It is not a system, there is no pattern, no trick – just right math done right, consistently. The advantage you gain is tiny, but it is real, and over enough hands it adds up.