A video poker trainer that tells you what each mistake costs
The table above deals real hands. Pick your holds, draw, and the play you made is graded against a full enumeration of every possible draw — not a sample, not an opinion. Most trainers say “wrong”. This one says “−0.7419” on the 5-credit bet you actually play, and names the strategy line you played instead of the one you should have.
Why exact EV matters
Video poker is one of the few things on a casino floor that is fully solvable. A dealt hand has exactly 32 possible holds; for each one the solver plays out every possible draw from the rest of the deck (47 cards, or 48 on Joker Wild’s 53-card deck), scores each result against the paytable, and averages. The hold with the highest average is the best play by definition rather than by opinion, and the whole solve takes a few milliseconds in your browser.
That also makes the size of a mistake measurable, which is the part that changes how you practise. On 9/6 Jacks or Better, keeping an ace kicker with a low pair costs 0.1484 per coin every time you do it — 0.7419 on a 5-credit bet, the scale the trainer displays; taking the low pair over four to a flush costs 0.3891 per coin. A trainer that only marks holds right or wrong calls those the same thing. They are not: one deserves a week of drilling and the other deserves an afternoon. Ranking your own errors by EV loss is what makes twenty minutes of practice land somewhere useful.
How to practise
Deal, hold, draw. On a keyboard, 1–5 toggle the holds and Space draws and deals the next hand; on a phone you tap the cards and use the thumb bar. The moment you draw, the feedback panel shows your hold’s EV, the best hold’s EV, the gap between them in coins and in dollars at your denomination ($0.25 to $5), and the strategy-chart line each of the two plays corresponds to — so a mistake teaches a rule instead of a feeling.
Misplays are recorded as you make them, in your browser or on your account if you sign in, and can be replayed as drills until the pattern stops recurring. The loop that works is short and repeated: a few hundred hands on one game, read what the session report says your two most expensive habits are, drill those, then go again. Picking up a second game before the first one is solid mostly teaches you to confuse two charts.
The games it covers
Jacks or Better is the reference machine, free and unlimited with no account: learn it first, because every other chart is a small adjustment from it. Free accounts get 50 hands per advanced game, per day. Pro removes that cap and adds custom paytables — type in the full-house and flush rows of the machine actually in front of you and train against that exact table. Each game’s full chart has its own page: 9/6 Jacks or Better in 18 lines, 10/7 Double Bonus in 36, 9/6 Double Double Bonus, and the two-list 20/7/5 Joker Wild chart.
What makes the feedback trustworthy
The long version — how the enumeration is built, and every check it had to pass before any of it was published — is on the methodology page. The trainer teaches ordered strategy lists, which trade an exactly measured 0.036% on 9/6 Jacks or Better for something a person can actually remember; the solver underneath is always optimal, and you can see its true ranking for any hand yourself.
Where to go next
The interactive strategy charts give the whole ordered decision list for each game, which is what the trainer is grading you against. The hand analyzer works the other way round: hand it five specific cards and it ranks all 32 holds by exact EV, with a permalink you can paste into an argument. And the dilemmas that come up most often are already answered with exact numbers — low pair vs four to a flush, whether to keep a kicker, and breaking a pat straight for four to a royal — alongside the rest of the hand questions and the guides and research library.
Training and math only. No real-money gambling, no wagering, no prizes — 18+.