Quick answer: Video poker is the only machine game that tells you its return before you play. Two numbers on the pay table — what a full house pays and what a flush pays — move the return from 99.54% down to 97.30% on otherwise identical machines. Learn to read those two numbers and you are ahead of most players in the room.
What the Numbers in “9/6” Actually Mean
A Jacks or Better machine is described by two figures: the payout for a full house and the payout for a flush, per coin bet. A 9/6 machine pays 9 coins for a full house and 6 for a flush. An 8/5 machine pays 8 and 5.
Everything else on the two pay tables is usually identical. The royal flush still pays 800, four of a kind still pays 25. Only those two rows change — and because full houses and flushes come up often, those two rows carry the entire difference in return.
The Pay Table Is the Return
These are the standard Jacks or Better variants and what each returns with perfect play:
| Pay table | Full house / flush | Return with optimal play |
|---|---|---|
| 9/6 — “full pay” | 9 / 6 | 99.54% |
| 9/5 | 9 / 5 | 98.45% |
| 8/6 | 8 / 6 | 98.39% |
| 8/5 | 8 / 5 | 97.30% |
| 7/5 | 7 / 5 | 96.15% |
| 6/5 — avoid | 6 / 5 | 95.00% |
The spread between the top and bottom rows is 4.5 percentage points. On ₱100 a hand at 600 hands an hour, that difference is roughly ₱2,700 an hour in expected cost — on machines that look the same and are often sitting in the same lobby.
Note the phrase doing the work: with optimal play. These returns assume you make the mathematically correct decision on every hand. Play by instinct and you will typically give back one to two percentage points, which is enough to turn a 99.54% machine into a worse proposition than a decent slot.
Why Max Coins Is Not Optional
The royal flush pays 250 per coin on bets of one to four coins, but 800 per coin on five. That single jump is worth about 1.5% of total return, and it is the most expensive mistake in the game because it is entirely avoidable.
If five coins at a given denomination is more than you want to risk, the correct move is to drop to a lower denomination and still bet five coins — not to bet fewer coins at the higher one. Betting four coins on a ₱5 machine is strictly worse than betting five on a ₱1 machine.
Video Poker Against Slots
The meaningful difference is not the return itself — it is that the return is visible. A slot’s RTP is set by the operator within a range the provider supplies, and outside a handful of regulated markets it is not displayed on the machine. You can read a slot’s volatility from its behaviour, but you generally cannot read its return.
Video poker inverts that. The pay table is printed on the screen before you commit a peso, and the return follows from it deterministically. You are not being asked to trust a disclosure; you are being shown the maths. Our guide to slot RTP and volatility covers what you can and cannot infer on the slot side, and table games versus slots puts the house edges side by side.
Five Rules That Capture Most of the Edge
A full Jacks or Better strategy chart runs to about thirty ranked hand types. These five decisions account for the large majority of the mistakes casual players make:
- Always bet five coins. Covered above, and worth roughly 1.5%.
- Never hold a kicker with a pair. Keeping an ace alongside a low pair reduces your draw and returns nothing.
- Hold four to a royal over a made flush or a made straight. Breaking a paying hand feels wrong and is correct — the royal draw is worth more than the sure 6 or 4 coins.
- Never break a full house or four of a kind. There is no draw worth the hand you already hold.
- A low pair beats four cards to an inside straight. The pair can improve to trips, a full house or quads; the inside straight has four outs and pays 4.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is video poker actually beatable?
Not on its own in most cases. Full-pay Jacks or Better returns 99.54%, which is still below 100%. Historically a few pay tables such as full-pay Deuces Wild returned slightly over 100% with flawless play, but those machines are effectively extinct online. Treat video poker as the cheapest machine game to play, not as a source of profit.
Where do I find the pay table?
It is displayed on the main game screen, usually across the top. Read the full house and flush rows before your first hand. If a game hides its pay table until after you bet, that is itself a reason to pick another game.
Does the machine adjust to how I play?
No. Each deal comes from a shuffled 52-card deck, and the odds of every draw are fixed by the deck rather than by your history. A machine cannot “go cold” because you have been winning.
How much does imperfect play cost?
Roughly one to two percentage points for a reasonably careful player who has not learned a chart. That is enough to erase most of the advantage 9/6 has over 8/5, which is why the pay table and the strategy have to be treated as one decision rather than two.
Is a progressive royal jackpot worth chasing?
Only when it is large enough to lift the total return, and it rarely is. A royal is a roughly one-in-40,000 hand. Our explainer on how progressive jackpots grow covers why the headline figure and the realistic expectation are so far apart.
Final Thoughts
Video poker is the one machine on the floor that shows its work. Two rows on the pay table decide almost the whole return, max coins is worth another 1.5%, and a handful of hold decisions cover most of the rest. None of that makes it a way to earn money — the return is below 100% and it stays below 100%.
What it does mean is that if you are going to play a machine, this is the one where the numbers are on the table rather than hidden behind a certificate. Set a session budget before you start and stop when it is gone. If gambling has stopped being entertainment, our responsible gambling page lists the support available in the Philippines.
