How to play video poker
One deal, one draw, and a paytable that tells you the truth. Here are the rules, the two habits that protect your money, and a first strategy you can learn today.
The whole game in four steps
1) Bet and press deal — you get five cards. 2) Choose any of them to hold. 3) Press draw — every card you didn’t hold is replaced from the same shuffled deck. 4) Your final five cards are paid according to the table printed on the machine. That’s the entire game: one decision per hand, 32 possible ways to make it, and — unlike almost anything else in a casino — a mathematically correct answer every single time.
Habit one: always bet five coins
Every payout scales linearly with your bet except one: the royal flush pays 250-per-coin at one to four coins, but 800-per-coin at five. Betting short doesn’t make the game cheaper — it makes it worse, because you give up most of the royal’s value. If five coins at your denomination is too much money, play a lower denomination at max coins instead. A $0.25 machine at five coins costs $1.25 a hand and keeps the full 800; a $1 machine at one coin costs less per hand than max quarters and still cuts the royal to 250.
Habit two: read the paytable before you sit down
Identical-looking machines pay differently, and the difference is printed on the glass. On a Jacks or Better game, find the full house and flush rows in the one-coin column: 9 and 6 is the full-pay version, returning 99.54% with perfect play — 8/5 returns 97.30%. Ten seconds of reading is worth more than everything else on this page.
Your first strategy: six holds cover most hands
Full strategy is an ordered list — find the first line that matches your hand and hold those cards. The full 18-line chart is worth learning, but these six lines already handle the bulk of deals. Exact EVs per coin on 9/6 Jacks or Better:
EVs vary slightly with the exact discards — every number above is a real deal solved exactly, and you can check any of them in the analyzer.
Two beginner traps worth naming now: never keep a kicker with a pair (an exact −0.1484 per coin, every time), and never keep three cards of a flush — it’s four-or-nothing.
Then practice where mistakes have price tags
Rules take five minutes; the money is in the holds. Our free trainer deals real hands, grades every hold against the exact best play, and tells you what each miss cost — in expected value, not vibes.
Play your first 20 hands — free, no signup →Going to a casino soon? Follow the 7-day practice plan. Wondering how this compares to the machines next to it? Video poker vs slots. No real-money gambling here — training and math only, 18+.