Video Poker Hand Analyzer

Pick any five cards — see the EV of all 32 holds, ranked.

What the 32 holds mean

Five cards can be kept or discarded independently, which gives 2⁵ = 32 possible holds — from keeping everything down to throwing all five away. The ranking lists every one of them, best first, with the expected value of each in coins per coin bet at max bet (five coins, where the royal pays 800 per coin). An EV of 1.2128 means that hold returns 1.2128 coins on average for every coin you put in; the difference between two rows is exactly what choosing the worse one costs you, per hand, forever.

Opening a hold shows where its value comes from: each possible final hand, how often the draw lands there, what it pays, and its contribution to the total. That breakdown is usually more convincing than the ranking itself — it is where you see that a flush draw is carried by nine clean outs, or that a lone pair is carried by trips and quads you rarely notice.

How the EV is computed

For each of the 32 holds the solver enumerates every possible draw from the rest of the deck — 47 cards on a 52-card game, 48 on Joker Wild’s 53-card deck — evaluates each resulting hand against the selected paytable, and averages. No sampling, no simulation, no lookup tables. It runs in a Web Worker in your browser, so the cards you type never reach a server, and a full 32-hold solve finishes in a few milliseconds.

The same engine also computes whole-game returns by solving all 2,598,960 possible deals, collapsed into 134,459 suit-equivalence classes — which is how it was checked: reproducing the published optimal returns to seven decimal places is only possible if the evaluator, the enumeration and the paytables are all correct at once. The full audit is on the methodology page.

Paytables it solves

The picker offers the full-pay table for each game. The correct hold is a property of the paytable rather than the name on the glass, so a short-pay machine can want a different play: Pro accounts can enter any paytable as a custom table and solve hands on it exactly. Joker Wild is solved on its own 53-card deck. Every preset is open here whether you are signed in or not; the paytable guide helps you work out which machine you are actually looking at.

Three hands worth solving

K♠ Q♠ J♠ 10♠ 9♦ — a made straight, and you break it. Four to a royal is worth 19.5957 per coin against 4.0000 for keeping the pat hand: the strongest unmade holding in the game.

3♣ 3♦ 7♦ 9♦ K♦ — a low pair against four to a flush. The flush draw wins, 1.2128 to 0.8237. Reverse the draw to an open-ended straight and the answer flips to the pair, which is the single most commonly reversed rule in the game.

A♥ A♣ A♠ 8♦ 8♣ on 10/7 Double Bonus — break the full house. Three aces are worth 10.1147 against 10.0000 for the pat hand, because quad aces pay 160 on that table. Switch the same permalink to Jacks or Better and keeping the full house becomes correct by a wide margin.

Share a hand instead of arguing about it

Every solved hand has its own link, and the share button copies it. Paste it into a forum thread or a group chat and it opens with the hand already solved and every hold ranked; the link unfurls with a picture of the cards and the best hold highlighted, so the thread can look at the numbers instead of trading anecdotes.

Questions this already answers

The arguments that come up over and over have their own write-ups, each with the exact EVs and a permalink into this solver: breaking a made flush for four to a royal, three to a royal against a high pair, and aces full on Double Bonus — with the rest in the hand questions index. To stop making the mistake rather than diagnosing it afterwards, the trainer deals hands and prices every misplay as you make it, and the strategy charts give the ordered list it grades against.

Training and math only. No real-money gambling, no wagering, no prizes — 18+.