Reading a video poker paytable before you put a coin in

Video poker is the one machine game that tells you its terms before you play. The paytable is the contract: it lists every paying hand and what each pays per coin, and two machines running identical software can have different paytables standing side by side. We set out how to read one, and which rows are worth looking at first.

The deal is fixed, the paytable is not

Whatever the machine, the first five cards come from a 52-card deck, and there are 2,598,960 five-card hands. That part cannot be adjusted, and it is worth knowing what it hands you before the draw.

Hand	Five-card combinations	Dealt about once in
royal flush	4	649,740
straight flush	36	72,193
four of a kind	624	4,165
full house	3,744	694
flush	5,108	509
three of a kind	54,912	47

Those ten categories sum to exactly 2,598,960, which is the arithmetic check. The draw is what turns these into the frequencies that matter — a pair held and three cards replaced is a different distribution altogether — but the dealt numbers set the floor, and they explain why the royal row is a jackpot rather than a pay.

The two rows that move

On a Jacks or Better machine the rows for full house and flush are where operators adjust the game, and the shorthand names the two: a machine called 9/6 pays nine coins per coin for a full house and six for a flush, and an 8/5 pays eight and five. Everything else on the two paytables is usually identical.

What one coin is worth is easy to put a number on. Paytables are quoted per coin, so a row paying nine on a five-coin bet pays 45 coins — and dropping it to eight pays 40, which is five coins, or one whole bet. So each coin taken off a row costs you exactly one bet every time that hand lands.

If the hand lands about once in	One coin off that row costs
50 hands	2.0% of your return
100 hands	1.0%
200 hands	0.5%

Full houses and flushes both land in the general region of once in a hundred hands under sensible play, which is why a single coin on either row is close to a full percentage point, and why two coins across both rows — the 9/6 to 8/5 change — is the difference between a good machine and an ordinary one. That is the whole reason the shorthand exists.

The row that is not linear

Look at the royal flush row across the five coin columns. It will typically read 250, 500, 750, 1,000 — and then 4,000. Four of the five columns pay 250 per coin and the fifth pays 800. Every other row on the machine multiplies cleanly; this one does not.

The consequence is that short-coin play gives up part of the game’s return, and the part it gives up is concentrated in the rarest hand on the table. How much depends on how often a royal is actually made, which depends on how the draw is played — but the direction is not in doubt, and the practical rule is to drop the denomination rather than the number of coins. Five coins at a penny beats one coin at a nickel, every time.

Bonus paytables and where the money comes from

Machines that pay extra for specific four-of-a-kinds — aces, or twos through fours — have to fund that from somewhere, because the extra is not a gift. The row to check is two pair: on plain Jacks or Better it pays two, and on most bonus variants it pays one. Two pair is one of the most common paying hands on the machine, so halving it funds a great deal of headline generosity.

That is the general reading method: find the rows that differ from the plain game, and work out which of them is common. A bigger number on a rare hand and a smaller number on a frequent one is a trade, and usually not in your favour. Our page on video poker covers the hand rankings and the mechanics of holding and drawing, and the habit of reading the terms before playing is the same one our column on ten things online casinos would rather you did not know keeps returning to.

What to check in the ten seconds before playing

The full house and flush rows, against the best version of the game you can find in the room. The two pair row, for whether the game has been funded by cutting it. And the five-coin column of the royal row, to confirm the jump is there. Those three checks separate paytables that differ by several points of return, and none of them requires knowing the figure the machine advertises anywhere — which, as our page on judging whether a site pays fairly argues, is the useful way round.