25/15/9/5 Deuces Wild strategy: one chart in five sections, by deuces held

What makes Deuces Wild different

The plain 52-card deck, with all four 2s fully wild: a deuce becomes whatever card makes your best hand, including a fifth card of a rank you already hold. Nothing below three of a kind pays — a pair of aces is worth exactly as much as a pair of 3s, a lone high card is worth nothing, and two pair is played as one pair. Four deuces pay 200, a wild royal 25, five of a kind 15, a natural royal 800. Two consequences drive the whole chart: a deuce is never thrown away, so every hand is played from the section for the number of deuces you were dealt; and made hands get broken — a pat flush or straight with two deuces (two deuces and a pair are already four of a kind, so no two-deuce full house exists), a pat flush with a deuce and three suited connectors, five of a kind with three deuces and a low pair.

The signature Deuces Wild play: you are dealt a flush and you break it. With the deuce filling one slot of the run, four natural ranks — the 4, 5, 9 and 10 of clubs — complete a 9-coin straight flush on the one-card draw, and so does any of the three remaining deuces; every other club still makes the flush back, and the draw adds straights (an off-suit 4, 5, 9 or 10) and three of a kind (an off-suit 6, 7 or 8) the pat hand never could. That beats the 2 coins the made flush hands you. The same logic sends three deuces back to the draw out of a pat five of a kind with 9s (15.0574 vs 15) but not out of five 10s (15 vs 14.9389), and keeps two bare deuces (3.2606) over a pat flush (2). Every number on this page is exact and reproducible in the analyzer.

The pay table

“25/15/9/5” names the wild royal, five of a kind, straight flush and four of a kind payouts — the cells that identify the table on the glass. Four of a kind is the number to check: the common “Not So Ugly Ducks” table (25/16/10/4, 99.73%) and Illinois Deuces (25/15/9/4, 98.91%) cut it to 4, and as the last section explains, that changes the chart.

How the chart was built

We solved all 32 holds of every suit-isomorphism class of the deck (134,459 classes covering 2,598,960 deals) with an exact enumeration engine, classified every hold into one of 165 named patterns, and searched the ORDER of those patterns for the highest exact return of “hold the first line you can make”. Then we merged the graded variants into one teachable line each, keeping only the splits that measurably pay, and scored every candidate chart the same exact way:

The 33-line chart is built to be remembered: every section follows the same backbone — pat hands, four-card draws, three-card holds, two-card holds, the deuces alone (or discard) — with the handful of exact-EV exceptions each line spells out (4 to a royal above a pat straight flush, a deuce's suited connectors above made hands, one pair above a four-flush, the suited two-royals above an inside straight), and every line says exactly which cards to hold. Its fixed, natural order is also the exact optimum for those lines (the optimizer finds no better arrangement of them). The full chart adds four splits worth 0.0014% together: the open and inside natural straight-flush draws around 10-J-Q suited, close and far three-card straight-flush draws, and 10-J suited above the inside straight with 10-Q and J-Q below it. Simpler charts cost real money — dropping the five-of-a-kind-with-10s line and the two-card suited royal line costs 0.047% of coin-in, more than thirty times what the full chart’s four extra lines gain back. Wizard of Odds publishes 100.71% for its simple strategy; transcribed into our line taxonomy and scored over every deal it reads 100.731% when ties go the player’s way, because two of its merged lines (“made three of a kind to straight flush”, “4 or 5 to a royal”) do not say which cards to hold.

Terms: “royal cards” are 10 through ace. “Inside one run of five” means the held cards all fit a single five-card straight window — the wheel A-2-3-4-5 counts, a deuce filling the 2. “Touching cards 6-7 or higher” (lines 8 and 18) are two suited neighbours from 6-7 up to 9-10; below that the slot under them is the wild 2 itself, so 5-6, 4-5 and 3-4 suited lose to the deuces alone. An “inside” straight draw is one a single rank completes — including 3-4-5-6, because the 2 under it is wild, not a card you can draw; A-3-4-5 is never played because only a deuce fills it. With two pair (line 28) keep either pair, not both — the two holds are worth exactly the same, and keeping both pays less.

Appendix: the full 37-line chart (100.758%)

For players who want the last 0.0014%: the same order with every paying gradation kept — open four-card straight-flush draws above 10-J-Q suited and inside ones below it, the three-card straight-flush draws split into close (consecutive or one gap) and far (two gaps), and the two-card royal draws split around the inside straight. The first 25 lines are identical to the teaching chart.

What the full chart still gives up (0.0044% of coin-in) is penalty-card territory: a deuce with two suited A-high royal cards, which beats the lone deuce only when no discard blocks its straights, is the largest single piece at 0.0032%; the K-high two-card royal draws without a deuce are 0.0009%.

Other Deuces Wild pay tables

This chart is solved for the full-pay table, and the trainer prices every hand exactly on whichever table you pick, so you can see what the full-pay chart costs elsewhere. Played line for line on 25/16/10/4 (“Not So Ugly Ducks”) it returns 98.785% against that table’s own 99.728% optimum — a 0.944% gap, because with four of a kind cut to 4 and a flush paying 3, two pair and four to a flush rank above a pair there, and five of a kind is never broken for the deuces. On 25/15/9/4 (Illinois Deuces) it returns 98.043% against 98.913%, a 0.870% gap; two pair and four to a flush rank above a pair there too. Those tables want their own chart; until one is solved here, read the trainer’s exact EVs on them rather than this list.

Practice it in the trainer — every graded hand shows which line you played and which was right. New to video poker? Start with the 9/6 Jacks or Better chart. Training and math only; no real-money gambling, 18+.

Coming from a game where pairs pay? Compare all five charts to see how far wild-card play sits from the others.