Pays per coin with 5 coins bet: royal 800, straight flush 50, four of a kind 25, full house and flush as chosen, straight 4, three of a kind 3, two pair 2, jacks or better 1. Auto-play uses a 16-line simple strategy, which gives up about 0.15% against perfect play. "Show best hold" checks all 32 holds against every possible draw.
This video poker simulator does two jobs. Play it hand by hand and press “Show best hold” when you’re not sure: it checks all 32 ways to hold your five cards against every possible draw and tells you which is worth the most, and what your choice cost. Or switch to auto-play and run 100 sessions of 1,000 hands on a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine. You’ll see a return around 99%, a median session a little down, and the odd session that hit a royal flush and changed everything. It’s free and uses play money only.
Using the video poker simulator
Pick the pay table first. 9/6 means the full house pays 9 and the flush 6 per coin, and it’s the best common Jacks or Better game at 99.54% with perfect play. 8/5 is everywhere and returns 97.30%. 6/5 drops to 95%. That one line on the paytable is worth more than any strategy tip.
In Play mode, deal, tap the cards you want to keep, then draw. The best-hold check takes a moment because it’s doing the maths properly: up to 1.5 million draws for a full redraw.
What auto-play shows you
The royal flush is about 2% of the return on its own, and it turns up roughly once every 40,000 hands. So in a few thousand hands you almost certainly won’t see one, and your return will look a couple of points worse than the published figure. That’s not the machine being tight; it’s the royal you haven’t hit yet. Run 20,000 hands a session and the numbers start to settle.
Auto-play uses a simple strategy that gives up about 0.15% against perfect play: close enough to show the real swings without pretending to be a strategy chart.
For the theory behind the pay tables, see the video poker calculator. For the cost per hour at your speed, the casino simulator compares every game.
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