The shorthand
Video poker machines are named by two numbers: what the full house pays and what the flush pays, per coin. A 9/6 machine pays nine for a full house and six for a flush. An 8/5 machine pays eight and five.
Every other row of a Jacks or Better pay table is usually identical, which is why these two carry the name and why two machines that look the same can differ by more than two percentage points of return.
The tables you will meet
| Pay table | Full house | Flush | Published return | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 Jacks or Better | 9 | 6 | 99.54% | Full pay. Increasingly rare. |
| 9/5 Jacks or Better | 9 | 5 | 98.45% | One unit off the flush. |
| 8/6 Jacks or Better | 8 | 6 | 98.39% | One unit off the full house. |
| 8/5 Jacks or Better | 8 | 5 | 97.30% | The most common schedule on a casino floor. |
| 7/5 Jacks or Better | 7 | 5 | 96.15% | Common on low-denomination machines. |
| 6/5 Jacks or Better | 6 | 5 | 95.00% | Sometimes called 'short pay'. Avoid. |
Return percentages assume perfect play and are taken from published optimal-play analyses. Unlike the hold values elsewhere on this site, they are not derived here: computing them requires evaluating every hold for all 2,598,960 deals.
What each removed coin costs
Under optimal play a full house arrives on roughly 1.15% of hands and a flush on roughly 1.10%. So each coin taken off the full house costs about 1.15 percentage points of return, and each coin off the flush about 1.10.
That arithmetic explains the table above: 9/6 to 8/5 removes one coin from each, and the return falls from 99.54% to 97.30%, a little over two points.
Why this matters more than it looks
A 99.54% machine and a 97.30% machine feel identical to play. They deal the same hands at the same speed with the same screen.
At five coins of a dollar denomination and 600 hands an hour, that is $3,000 through the machine per hour. The difference between those two returns is roughly $67 an hour in expected loss.
How to check in five seconds
Look at the pay table on the screen, find the full house row and the flush row, and read the single-coin column. If it says 9 and 6, the machine is worth playing. If it says 8 and 5, it is an ordinary machine. If it says 6 and 5, walk.
Two other things belong in the same glance: always bet maximum coins, because the royal payout jumps from 250 to 800 per coin only at full bet, and check that the royal row actually says 4000 at five coins.
Our four to a royal page explains why that royal payout drives so much of correct strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does 9/6 Jacks or Better mean?
- The machine pays nine coins for a full house and six for a flush, per coin bet. It is the full-pay version, returning about 99.54% with perfect play.
- How much worse is an 8/5 machine?
- About 2.2 percentage points, from 99.54% to 97.30%. The games are otherwise identical.
- Why do the full house and flush get the name?
- Because they are the two rows casinos actually change. The rest of a Jacks or Better pay table is usually the same on every machine.
- Should I always bet five coins?
- Yes. The royal flush pays 800 per coin only at maximum bet and 250 per coin below it, which is a large part of the machine's return.
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.