Jacks or Better
Jacks or Better is the standard video poker game in which a five-card draw hand pays only if it finishes as a pair of jacks or higher, with no wild cards in the deck. The player is dealt five cards, chooses which to hold, and draws replacements once. Its name has also become shorthand for the base pay table that most other video poker games are built on.
How the Pay Table Sets the Return
Every version of Jacks or Better pays 800 per coin for a royal flush at maximum coins, 25 for any four of a kind, 2 for two pair and 1 for a pair of jacks or better. The lines that change between versions are the full house and the flush, and players name each table after them.
So a 9/6 game pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush, and with perfect strategy at five coins it returns 99.54%.
That figure is calculated, not sampled: each possible hold is valued over all 2,598,960 deals, and the best hold’s average gives the return. It describes the long run only, so €1,000 wagered on 9/6 costs about €4.60 on average, while any single session can swing far wider.
Full-Pay 9/6 Against the Common 8/5
The two versions look identical on screen apart from two numbers. Returns below are the published optimal-play figures at maximum coins.
9/6 Jacks or Better | 8/5 Jacks or Better |
|---|---|
| Full house pays 9 | Full house pays 8 |
| Flush pays 6 | Flush pays 5 |
| Returns 99.54% | Returns 97.30% |
| Royal flush pays 800 per coin | Royal flush pays 800 per coin |
Where Players Meet Jacks or Better
Online, Jacks or Better sits in the video poker or table games section, and several studios release it with different pay tables under the same name. Which table a given casino runs varies between operators, so the paytable screen is the only reliable source.
What I check first is the full house line, because it shows the version straight away.
What Jacks or Better Is Confused With
A 99.54% return does not mean 99.54% of hands win. Under 9/6 with the best play, roughly 45% of hands pay anything, and only about a quarter pay more than the stake.
It is also easily mixed up with Tens or Better and Bonus Poker, which share the deal-and-draw format but change the qualifying pair or the four-of-a-kind payouts.
Nor is it Texas Hold’em: there is no opponent, and the pay table decides the price.
