Video Poker

Jacks-or-Better draw poker. Deal, hold the cards you want, draw, and get paid on pairs, straights, flushes and the royal.

Video poker is unusual among machine games because the paytable is printed on it and the deck composition is known, so the return can be computed exactly rather than estimated. Full-pay Jacks or Better returns about 99.5 percent with perfect play.

That figure depends entirely on the payout schedule, and the standard way machines are tightened is reducing the full house and flush payouts from 9 and 6 to 8 and 5 — which costs over two percent of return while looking almost identical. Reading the paytable before playing is the whole skill; the draw decisions are a solved table anyone can memorise.