Reading a Deuces Wild paytable

A Jacks or Better machine can be read off two rows, which is why 9/6 and 8/5 work as names. Deuces Wild needs eight, and the habit that works on Jacks or Better — glance at the full house, glance at the flush, sit down — will not tell you whether you are looking at the best paytable ever put on a casino floor or one that has had three points taken out of it.

The table has ten rows and the top two are effectively fixed. A natural royal flush pays 800 per coin at the maximum bet and four deuces pays 200, on practically every version of the game. Everything below that is where machines differ, and the convention is to quote those eight numbers in order:

There is no two pair row and no high pair row. On Deuces Wild the bottom of the table is three of a kind, which is the structural fact the whole strategy hangs off, and it is visible on the glass before you have played a hand.

Four of a kind is the heavy row

With four wild cards in the deck, four of a kind stops being a jackpot and becomes routine. Played correctly on the full-pay table it lands on roughly 6.5% of hands — about one in fifteen. On 9/6 Jacks or Better four of a kind arrives once in 423 hands.

That frequency is what makes the row expensive. Taking one coin per coin staked off a row costs you, per hand, the frequency of the hand being cut, so a coin off four of a kind in Deuces Wild costs something near six and a half points of return. The same coin taken off four of a kind in Jacks or Better would cost under a quarter of a point. It is the single most valuable row on a Deuces Wild table, and it is the one to look at first.

Three of a kind is commoner still, but it already pays one coin per coin staked, so there is no coin to take off it without turning it into a losing row; it never moves. The top of the table is the reverse case. Natural royal, four deuces, wild royal, five of a kind and straight flush together account for well under 1.5% of hands, so a generous headline number costs an operator very little.

The tables you actually meet

Three versions are common enough to have names.

Both of the lower two take the quad row down to 4, and both hand some of it back higher up. Not So Ugly Ducks raises five of a kind to 16, straight flush to 10, full house to 4 and flush to 3, which is why it keeps all but a point of the return. Illinois Deuces raises five of a kind to 16 and straight flush to 13 — the two showiest cuts to compensate with, and the two rarest rows on the table — while leaving the full house and flush where they were. The glass looks better than Not So Ugly Ducks and the machine returns eight tenths of a point less.

What to check, in order

Four of a kind first: a 5 there and you are almost certainly on full pay, a 4 and you need the rest of the row. Then the full house and flush, because those are where a trimmed table either compensates or does not — 4 and 3 is Not So Ugly Ducks territory, 3 and 2 alongside a 4 for quads is considerably worse. Then five of a kind and straight flush last, because a generous number in either is cheap for the operator to give and will not rescue a cut below it.

The rows that are missing matter too. Deuces Wild has no minimum paying pair and no two pair, so the bottom row of the table pays one coin per coin staked — your stake back and nothing more — on roughly 28% of hands. Reading the table tells you where a Deuces Wild machine's money actually is: not in the royal, which is rarer here than on Jacks or Better because you will often take a wild royal instead, but in the quad row, hand after hand. That is also why the swings feel gentler than the top of the glass suggests.

And as always, full pay is not the same as winning. A Deuces Wild machine over 100% belongs to whoever has memorised its chart; played by instinct it gives back several points, which is more than the whole difference between the three tables above.