Which cards to hold, and by how much

Why holds are the whole game

The cards you are dealt are luck. The five buttons you press are the entire skill, and the gap between correct and plausible play is larger in video poker than in any other machine game.

Each hand below is worked out by enumerating every possible draw and averaging the payout, on a 9/6 Jacks or Better schedule. Values are in coins returned per coin bet, so a hold worth 1.00 breaks even.

Four to a royal, or the made flush?

Dealt: Ah Kh Qh Jh 3h. A pat flush pays six coins. Throwing one away to chase a royal is the single most counter-intuitive correct play in video poker, and it is not close.

Four to a royal, or the made straight?

Dealt: Ah Kh Qh Jh 10c. The same decision with a made straight, which pays four. Break it.

Low pair, or four to a flush?

Dealt: 5h 5c 9h Kh 3h. A pair of fives pays nothing on a Jacks or Better machine, and four to a flush is the better hold.

Low pair, or four to an open-ended straight?

Dealt: 6h 6c 7d 8s 9c. Now the pair wins, which is the reverse of the flush case and the reason this pair of decisions is worth learning together.

High pair, or three to a royal?

Dealt: Qh Qc Kh Jh 4d. A paying pair against three royal cards. The margin here is the narrowest on this page.

Nothing at all: which high cards?

Dealt: Ac Kd 7h 4s 2c. No pair, no draw. Two unsuited high cards beat one, and both beat drawing five.

The pattern underneath

Three rules explain almost every row above.

Chase the royal past anything that is not a royal. A four-card royal is worth 18.43 coins, against 6.00 for a made flush and 4.00 for a made straight. The royal pays 800 for one coin, and that single payout dominates every other consideration in the game.

A low pair beats a straight draw but loses to a flush draw. The low pair is worth 0.8237. Four to a flush is worth 1.2128, which beats it; four to an open-ended straight is worth 0.6809, which does not. The flush pays six and the straight pays four, and that two-coin difference decides both hands.

A paying pair beats three to a royal, barely. 1.5365 against 1.4884, a margin of 0.0481 coins. This is the closest common decision in the game, and it is the one where holding the pair feels boring and is right.

Reading the margins

Notice how different the stakes are. Breaking a flush for a four-card royal gains over twelve coins; holding a queen pair over three royal cards gains 0.0481. Both are correct, but only one of them matters much, and a player with limited patience for memorisation should learn the royal rule first.

Our dealt hand odds page shows how often each of these situations actually arrives.

Hold values and hand frequencies on this page are computed by full enumeration: every one of the 2,598,960 five-card deals, and every possible draw from the 47 remaining cards. The evaluator is checked against published hand counts before any page is generated. Full-game return percentages such as 99.54% come from published optimal-play analyses and are attributed rather than derived here, because deriving them requires evaluating every hold for every deal. Pay tables vary by machine, so read the screen.