Katrina Griffiths
Senior editor
Published on: 05.08.2026
Video poker explained: rules, variants and why the paytable decides your return
Video poker is similar to a game of slots but plays nothing like one. You decide on every hand; the correct decision is knowable, and the game’s return is printed on the screen before you stake anything.
It also contains one of the best bets in the casino and one of the most ordinary, under the same name and the same artwork. Two numbers on the paytable tell you which one you’re sitting at.
How a hand works
Video poker consists of a five-card draw against a paytable, with no opponents and no bluffing. You’re paid by the machine for making a listed hand, and other players are irrelevant.
- Choose your coin size and how many coins to bet, usually one to five.
- Five cards are dealt.
- You hold the cards you want to keep and discard the rest.
- Replacements are drawn for the cards you discarded.
- The final five-card hand is paid according to the paytable, or it isn’t paid at all.
If you bet the maximum coins: On Jacks or Better, a royal flush pays 250 per coin at one to four coins and 800 per coin at five. That single disproportionate jackpot is worth roughly a percentage point of total return, so playing four coins instead of five gives away more than most strategy errors ever will. If five coins at your chosen denomination is more than you want to stake, choose a lower bet per coin instead of betting fewer coins.
The hands that pay
Standard poker rankings, with a floor. On Jacks or Better, the paying hands run:
- Royal flush
- Straight flush
- Four of a kind
- Full house
- Flush
- Straight
- Three of a kind
- Two pair
- A pair of jacks or better
Anything below a pair of jacks pays nothing, and most hands you’re dealt will end there. The high pair is the workhorse of the game: it returns your stake and keeps you in the seat while the rarer hands do the actual work.
The variants worth knowing
Dozens of variants exist. Three families cover almost everything you’ll find in a regulated lobby.
Jacks or Better
The baseline, and the one to learn first. Simple paytable, no wild cards, and the lowest variance of the three families, which means your bankroll moves slowly enough to actually learn from. On the full-pay 9/6 table with correct play, it returns 99.54%, a house edge of 0.46%.
Deuces Wild
All four 2s are wild and can stand in for any card. The paytable is restructured to pay for it: the minimum paying hand rises to three of a kind, and the common hands pay less.
Full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.76% with perfect play, which is over 100% and isn’t a misprint. However, full-pay tables are rare, and what you find online is usually a reduced version. “Perfect play” means the mathematically correct hold on every hand over thousands of hands, which is a harder standard than it sounds when deuces make the correct hold counterintuitive.
Bonus, Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus
These pay premiums on four of a kind, with the largest premiums on aces, and in Double Double Bonus on aces with a specific kicker. The premiums are funded by weaker returns on the hands you actually hit often, which makes these games noticeably more volatile than Jacks or Better.
Full-pay Double Bonus returns 100.17%. The 9/6 version of Double Double Bonus returns about 98.98%. Same family, and a difference large enough to matter.
Why the paytable is the whole game
Video poker paytables are named by two numbers, and those numbers are the payouts per coin for a full house and a flush. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush. An 8/5 machine pays 8 and 5.
That is the entire difference between the two games. Same name, same artwork, same rules, same strategy. And the return moves from 99.54% on 9/6 to roughly 97.3% on 8/5, a swing of more than two percentage points before you play a single hand.
Two rows of a table are worth more than your strategy. That gap is larger than the cost of most strategy mistakes a competent player will make in a session combined. Choosing the machine matters more than playing it well, and no amount of correct holding rescues a bad paytable.
Operators choose which version to deploy, exactly as they choose between RTP configurations of the same slot. The figure that applies is the one in front of you, not the one on a review page, and the same game can carry a different table at two different sites.
How to read a paytable before you play
- Open the paytable before your first hand. It’s on the game screen and usually one tap away.
- Find the full house and flush rows and read the one-coin column.
- 9 and 6 is full pay. 8 and 5 is a materially worse game. 7 and 5 is worse again.
- Check the royal flush pays 800 per coin at five coins. If it pays less, the return is below the figure the variant is known for.
- Check the stated RTP in the game information panel and remember it assumes optimal play rather than yours.
Thirty seconds of reading, repeated at every new site, is the highest-value habit in the game.
Four mistakes that cost more than they look
- Betting fewer than five coins. It removes the royal flush premium that the advertised return depends on, and it’s the most expensive habit in the game.
- Keeping a kicker with a high pair. Holding an ace alongside a pair of kings feels prudent and adds nothing. It costs you a draw and lowers your chance of improving the hand.
- Chasing three to a flush over a paying pair. Three cards to a flush look promising and pay nothing on their own. When you already hold a pair of jacks or better, that pair is the hand.
- Carrying one variant’s strategy into another. Wild cards change the correct hold on a large share of hands, so Jacks or Better instincts lose money on Deuces Wild. Learn one variant, then learn the next one properly.
None of these are exotic. They’re the four things that separate a 99.54% game played at 99.54% from the same game played at several points less.
Where video poker sits against other games
Figures assume correct strategy and standard rules, and are approximate published values.
| Game | RTP | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| Deuces Wild, full pay | 100.76% | None, in theory |
| Video poker, 9/6 Jacks or Better | 99.54% | 0.46% |
| Double Double Bonus, 9/6 | ~98.98% | ~1.02% |
| Blackjack, basic strategy | ~99.5% | ~0.5% |
| Video poker, 8/5 Jacks or Better | ~97.3% | ~2.7% |
| European roulette | 97.30% | 2.70% |
| Online slots, typical range | 94% to 97% | 3% to 6% |
| American roulette | 94.74% | 5.26% |
Two things stand out. The best video poker paytable beats blackjack, and the same game on a reduced paytable is worse than European roulette. Both entries are labelled Jacks or Better.
The catch is that video poker’s edge is conditional on your decisions, the way blackjack’s is. A 99.54% game returns 99.54% to someone playing correctly and meaningfully less to everyone else. It’s one of the only games where the published figure and your actual figure can differ by several points based on nothing but which cards you hold.
Speed matters too. Video poker runs at several hundred hands an hour, faster than any table game, and the house edge applies to every dollar you wager rather than the money you brought. A small edge at high speed still adds up, so work out your expected hourly cost and stick to that figure rather than trusting the percentage to feel small.
Conclusion
Read the full house and flush rows before you play. Bet maximum coins and drop the denomination if the total is too high. Learn one variant properly rather than three badly and start with Jacks or Better. Do those three things and you’re playing one of the lowest-edge games available at a licensed Alberta site.
RTP and house edge across other games are covered on the slots and blackjack pages, and if you’re new to online casinos in the province, the new players guide is the place to start.
You must be 18 or older to gamble online in Alberta. If gambling is causing problems for you or someone you know, the Alberta Health Services Addiction Helpline offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day at 1-866-332-2322, and GameSense is AGLC’s responsible gambling program.
