The casino secret hiding in plain sight: the pay table

Here is the secret: a video poker machine tells you how much it keeps before you put in a single coin. Slot machines hide their odds. Video poker prints them on the screen, in the pay table. Most players never read it.

You need about ten seconds.

Where to look

The pay table sits above the cards. It lists every paying hand, from royal flush down to "jacks or better", with one column for each number of coins you can bet (usually one to five).

Read the one-coin column. Every other column is the same numbers multiplied, with one important exception: the royal flush. More on that below.

The ten-second check for Jacks or Better

In Jacks or Better, only two lines usually change from machine to machine: full house and flush. Read those two numbers in the one-coin column and you know the game:

Returns are for max-bet play, from the exact counts published by Wizard of Odds. What that gap costs you per hour is in 9/6 vs 6/5: the pay table that costs you 11 times as much per hour.

The fifth-coin jump

Look across the royal flush row. On most machines it reads 250, 500, 750, 1,000 for one to four coins, then jumps to 4,000 at five coins: 800 per coin instead of 250.

That jump is part of the advertised return. On 9/6 Jacks or Better, perfect play at one to four coins returns 98.37%, against 99.54% at five coins (our engine; the published counts cover max bet, and the same engine reproduces them exactly). So a short bet throws away about 1.2% of return. It also changes the strategy slightly: with a smaller royal, some royal draws are no longer the best hold. The strategy calculator shows both.

Same name, different game

"Jacks or Better" on the glass does not tell you the return. Two machines with the same title can be 9/6 and 6/5. Other video poker families (Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus, Deuces Wild and more) use their own pay tables and need their own strategy, so the Jacks or Better lookup above does not apply to them. Check the game's own table before you play.

What the pay table cannot tell you

The pay table gives the return with perfect strategy. Real players make mistakes, and mistakes lower the return. Some cost a few cents; some cost a lot. See the 10 most expensive Jacks or Better mistakes.

And no common Jacks or Better table returns more than 100%. Reading the pay table does not let you win over time. It lets you choose to lose more slowly.