How to read a video poker paytable

Every video poker machine posts its paytable. Most people glance at the royal flush line and stop reading, which is the wrong end of the table. The royal comes up roughly once in 40,000 hands. The rows that actually decide how the game treats you are the full house and the flush, and they are the two most likely to have been quietly trimmed.

The two numbers that matter

Jacks or Better machines are named after those two payouts, per coin bet. A machine paying 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush is a 9/6 machine, usually called full pay. One paying 8 and 5 is an 8/5. Everything else on the table is typically identical.

Two small-looking changes move the expected return by more than two percentage points. That gap is larger than the difference between most casino games. It is also invisible unless you read the table, because the machines look identical otherwise.

Why five coins, always

Look at the royal flush row across the five bet columns and you will see something that does not fit the pattern:

Every other row multiplies cleanly. The royal does not. At four coins it pays 1,000 — the 250 rate. At five it jumps to 4,000, which is 800 per coin rather than 250. That bonus is built into the game's advertised return, so a player betting fewer than five coins is playing a materially worse game than the paytable claims. On 9/6 Jacks or Better, dropping to one coin costs roughly 1.4 percentage points of return.

The other variants are named the same way

Bonus Poker and Double Bonus pay more for specific four-of-a-kind hands — four aces, or low quads — and pay for that by shaving the rows underneath. Double Bonus in particular pays well at the top and thinly in the middle, which is why the swings feel bigger in both directions. The variance is higher even when the long-run return is similar.

Deuces Wild changes the structure outright, because four cards in the deck become wild. It has its own strategy, and the familiar Jacks or Better holds will actively cost you there.

What to check, in order

1. Full house and flush. These tell you which machine you are on.
2. The royal flush at five coins. Confirm the jump is there.
3. The rows in the middle — straight, three of a kind, two pair. Short-pay machines sometimes trim two pair from 2 to 1, which is a much bigger cut than it looks.
4. The minimum paying hand. On Jacks or Better it is a pair of jacks. On some variants it is a pair of kings, which is a far worse game.