Best Video Poker Games Explained: Variants, RTP, Odds & Strategy Differences

Why "video poker" isn't one game

Walk up to a bank of video poker machines at any online casino lobby and you'll find a dozen different titles sitting side by side — Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild, Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus, Joker Poker, and more. They look nearly identical: same five-card layout, same Deal and Draw buttons, same basic rhythm of holding cards and drawing replacements. But underneath that shared interface, each one is a genuinely different game with its own pay table, its own odds, and — critically — its own correct strategy. Treating them as interchangeable is one of the most expensive mistakes a new player can make, because a hold decision that's correct in one variant can be a clear mistake in another.

This guide is the category hub for understanding those differences. If you've never played video poker before, start with the full beginner's guide for the basics of how a hand unfolds, and the full hand ranking order if you need a refresher on what beats what. This article assumes you know the mechanics and focuses entirely on what changes from variant to variant: the rule twist that defines each game, how its pay table is typically shaped, roughly how its best-case return-to-player (RTP) compares to the others, and what that means for the strategy you need to use. For the mechanics of how a pay table actually converts into an RTP percentage, see how pay tables set RTP in detail, and for the full rule set behind any of these games, the full rulebook covers it end to end.

Jacks or Better: the baseline everything else is measured against

Every other variant in this guide is, in some sense, a modification of Jacks or Better, so it's worth understanding this one thoroughly before moving on. Jacks or Better uses a standard 52-card deck with no wild cards of any kind, and it pays out starting at a pair of Jacks, Queens, Kings, or Aces — hence the name. A pair of 10s or lower pays nothing at all, which is the first thing that surprises new players used to thinking of "any pair" as a winning hand.

Because there are no wilds and the qualifying hand is relatively strict, Jacks or Better produces the most evenly distributed pay table of any mainstream variant, and it's the game every other variant in this guide gets measured against.

Reading the pay table shorthand. You'll see Jacks or Better machines labeled with shorthand like "9/6" or "8/5" or "6/5." Those numbers refer to the payout, per coin bet, for a Full House and a Flush respectively — a 9/6 machine pays 9-for-1 on a Full House and 6-for-1 on a Flush, an 8/5 machine pays 8 and 5, and so on. Every other hand in the pay table — two pair, three of a kind, straight, four of a kind, straight flush, royal flush — is usually identical across these versions. The Full House and Flush payouts are the lever that gets adjusted, which is why they've become the shorthand the entire industry uses to describe a pay table at a glance. You'll see this same "X/Y" convention referenced throughout the rest of this guide for other variants, so it's worth internalizing here first.

That small difference in two payout lines has an outsized effect on RTP:

• 9/6 Jacks or Better (full pay) returns approximately 99.54% with mathematically perfect play — one of the best RTPs available in any casino game, video poker or otherwise.
• 8/5 Jacks or Better drops to roughly 97.3%.
• 6/5 Jacks or Better — common on machines aimed at casual players who won't check the pay table — falls to around 95%.

That's a swing of more than four percentage points between the best and worst version of what looks, at a glance, like the exact same game. Nothing about the gameplay changes between these versions; only the pay table does. This is the single most important lesson in this entire guide, and it applies to every variant covered below, not just Jacks or Better: the specific pay table matters more than the variant's name.

Strategy in Jacks or Better follows a well-documented hierarchy — hold a made pay-table hand over a draw, favor high pairs and suited high cards over low ones, and generally avoid drawing to inside straights except in specific low-value situations. Because the game has no wild cards distorting hand frequencies, its strategy chart is also the simplest one in the whole family to learn, which is a big part of why it's the standard entry point. How to play each hand correctly walks through that full decision tree in detail.

Deuces Wild: wild cards change everything

Deuces Wild takes the same 52-card deck and makes all four 2s wild — each deuce can substitute for any card, of any suit, to complete the best possible hand. That single rule change ripples through every part of the game.

With four wild cards in the deck, strong hands simply happen far more often than they do in Jacks or Better. A player holding a single deuce is already guaranteed at least three of a kind, and hands like four of a kind become common enough that a pay table built around a Jacks-or-Better-style structure would be wildly overpaying the player. To compensate, Deuces Wild pay tables raise the qualifying hand considerably — instead of paying from a pair of Jacks, the game typically pays nothing below three of a kind, meaning even two pair returns nothing on most machines. That's a jarring adjustment for anyone arriving from Jacks or Better, where two pair is a routine small win.

The pay table also gets restructured around the wild-card hierarchy in ways Jacks or Better never needs to consider. Because a four-of-a-kind made with a natural set of cards is a different probability event than a four-of-a-kind that only exists because of a wild deuce, and because a royal flush made entirely of natural cards is far rarer than one completed with a wild, full pay tables split these into separate categories with separate payouts — for example, a distinct line for four deuces (arguably the game's signature hand), a separate line for a "wild royal flush" (a royal completed using at least one deuce), and a natural royal flush paying the standard top jackpot. This layered structure is unique to wild-card games; Jacks or Better has no equivalent because it has no wilds to distinguish.

The reward for all this complexity is real: Full Pay Deuces Wild can exceed 100% RTP — approximately 100.76% — with mathematically perfect play, making it one of the only casino games in existence with a positive player expectation built directly into its pay table, before any loyalty points, comps, or promotions are factored in. That statistic gets repeated often in video poker circles, and for good reason, but it comes with an important caveat that matters more here than almost anywhere else in this guide: most real-world Deuces Wild machines are not full pay. Casinos routinely trim one or more payout tiers — the four-of-a-kind line, the straight flush line, the full house line — and each trim can knock a meaningful chunk off that headline number, sometimes pushing the actual RTP below 97% on a machine that still says "Deuces Wild" on the glass. Because the qualifying hand and payout structure are so different from Jacks or Better, checking the exact pay table before you sit down at a Deuces Wild machine matters more than it does for almost any other variant in this guide — a "good-looking" Deuces Wild machine and a full-pay one are not the same thing, and telling them apart requires reading every line of the table, not just the headline hands.

The strategy shift required is significant, too. Holding a single deuce and nothing else is often correct even over a pat straight or flush, because the deuce guarantees a strong hand on the draw with real upside toward four of a kind or better — a decision that would never come up in a non-wild game. The full beginner's guide covers the basics of the draw, but Deuces Wild strategy specifically deserves its own study before playing it for real stakes, since applying Jacks or Better instincts to a wild-card game will cost you money in ways that aren't obvious until you've seen the pay table side by side.

Joker Poker: one wild instead of four

Joker Poker takes a related but distinct approach: instead of turning four existing cards wild, it adds a single joker to the deck, bringing the total to 53 cards, and that one joker acts as a wild card substituting for any other card. It's a similar concept to Deuces Wild — a wild-card game with a raised qualifying hand and a restructured pay table — but with only one wild instead of four, the math and the resulting pay table shape are meaningfully different.

Joker Poker exists in several distinct sub-variants rather than one fixed rule set, and the qualifying hand varies between them — some versions pay starting from a pair of Kings or better, others from two pair, and the exact cutoff depends on the specific machine you're playing rather than a single industry-standard number. Unlike Jacks or Better (where "Jacks or better" is universal) or Deuces Wild (where the core wild-card mechanic is consistent even as pay tables vary), Joker Poker's qualifying hand itself changes from version to version, which makes checking the specific pay table on the machine you're about to play non-negotiable.

Strategically, having a single joker in the deck means wild-card holds come up far less often than in Deuces Wild, but when you're dealt the joker, holding it is almost always correct — much like the deuce-holding logic above, just with one wild card to build around instead of four.

Bonus Poker: trading full houses and flushes for a bigger jackpot hand

Bonus Poker starts from the exact Jacks or Better skeleton — same qualifying hand, same basic hand rankings — and makes one targeted change: it pays a boosted amount for Four of a Kind, especially Four Aces, compared to base Jacks or Better. That boost has to be funded from somewhere in the pay table, and in Bonus Poker it's usually funded by a slightly lower Full House or Flush payout than a comparable Jacks or Better machine offers.

The tradeoff is straightforward once you see it laid out: Bonus Poker gives you a bigger payout on a hand you'll hit relatively rarely (four of a kind), in exchange for a smaller payout on hands you'll hit far more often (full house and flush). Your "bread and butter" wins — the small, frequent payouts that make up most of a session — pay slightly less than in Jacks or Better, while the occasional big hit pays more. It doesn't dramatically change the game's overall variance the way the wild-card games or the Double Bonus family below do, but it does shift a small share of the pay table's return away from steady, frequent wins and toward a slightly bigger occasional one.

Strategy in Bonus Poker is very close to Jacks or Better, with one specific adjustment: because Four Aces (and, on some pay tables, four of any high card) pays disproportionately more, certain marginal holds involving an Ace kicker become slightly more attractive than they would be in base Jacks or Better. It's a small adjustment rather than a wholesale rethink, which makes Bonus Poker a reasonable, low-friction step for a player who's comfortable with Jacks or Better and wants to try a variant with a bit more jackpot upside without learning an entirely new strategy chart.

Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus Poker: kicker cards start to matter

Double Bonus Poker takes the same idea as Bonus Poker — boost the Four of a Kind payout, fund it with lower payouts elsewhere — and pushes it much further, with steeply tiered Four of a Kind payouts that differ based on exactly which four cards you hold. Double Double Bonus Poker, the more widely available of the two today, takes this tiering a step further still: the payout for Four of a Kind depends not just on the rank of the four cards, but on the specific fifth card — the "kicker" — sitting alongside them. A hand like four Aces with a 2, 3, or 4 as the kicker pays a distinctly larger jackpot-tier amount than four Aces with any other kicker, and four of a kind in other ranks (2s, 3s, or 4s, specifically, with an Ace-through-4 kicker) get their own boosted tier as well. This is a level of pay-table granularity that simply doesn't exist in Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker, where a four of a kind is a four of a kind regardless of what else is in your hand.

Funding all of that requires taking payout away from elsewhere in the table, and Double Double Bonus typically does it by paying less on two pair and on Full House or Flush than a comparable Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker machine would. The practical result is a game that concentrates a much larger share of its total return into a small number of rare, high-paying hands, and correspondingly less into the frequent small wins that make up the bulk of a typical session.

That concentration is exactly what makes Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus noticeably higher variance than Jacks or Better. In Jacks or Better, your return is spread relatively evenly across pairs, two pair, three of a kind, straights, and flushes, with the RTP built from a broad base of frequent, modest wins. In Double Double Bonus, a much bigger slice of your long-run return depends on hitting one of those specific, rare kicker-boosted four-of-a-kind hands. Two sessions of otherwise identical length and bet size can produce very different-feeling results on Double Double Bonus purely because of whether one of those rare hands landed — which is a direct, mechanical consequence of how the pay table is built, not bad luck or good luck in any deeper sense.

That kicker-dependent payout structure also changes correct strategy in a way none of the games above require. In Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker, the specific rank of a "dead" kicker card next to a made hand rarely affects your hold decision. In Double Double Bonus, it can flip the correct play entirely — whether to hold a four of a kind together with its kicker, or discard the kicker to draw for a shot at a differently-ranked four of a kind, depends on exactly which cards you're holding, something that never comes up in the base game. This is one of the clearest examples in the whole video poker family of why the strategy chart has to match the specific pay table you're playing — a Jacks or Better chart applied to Double Double Bonus will get several of these kicker situations wrong. How to play each hand correctly covers how these charts diverge by variant, and it's worth reviewing before playing the Double Bonus family for real money specifically because of how much the kicker rules change the correct decision tree.

All American and Aces and Faces: same skeleton, different emphasis

A handful of other Jacks-or-Better-based variants exist mainly to redistribute the pay table toward a different part of the hand hierarchy, and two of the more common examples are worth knowing by name even though they don't need the same depth of coverage as the games above.

All American pays the same boosted amount — commonly matching the Four of a Kind rate — for Straight, Flush, and Full House alike, rather than giving each hand its own separate, lower payout the way Jacks or Better does. That produces a game that's noticeably higher variance than base Jacks or Better and specifically rewards straights and flushes, since those hands now pay far more relative to the rest of the table than they do anywhere else in this guide.

Aces and Faces follows the Bonus Poker pattern of boosting Four of a Kind, but specifically singles out Four Aces and four-of-a-kind face cards (Jacks, Queens, Kings) for the biggest bumps, rather than treating all four-of-a-kind ranks identically the way Bonus Poker does.

Both are useful examples of a pattern that runs through this entire guide: take the Jacks-or-Better skeleton — same basic hand rankings, same core mechanics — and shift the pay table's emphasis toward a particular hand or hand family. Once you understand that pattern from the variants covered above, spotting what a new, unfamiliar-sounding variant is actually doing usually just requires reading its pay table for a minute or two.

Multi-hand video poker: a format, not a new ruleset

Multi-hand video poker — commonly offered in 3-hand, 10-hand, 52-hand, and even 100-hand formats — is often mistaken for its own category of game, but it isn't a separate ruleset at all. It's a format layered on top of any of the variants already covered in this guide. You're dealt one hand, you make one hold decision, and that same decision — which cards you keep and which you discard — is then applied simultaneously across multiple independently-drawn hands, each replacing your discarded cards with its own separately shuffled draw.

That single shared decision point is the key thing to understand: you don't get to make a different hold choice for each of the 10, 52, or 100 hands in play. You see one set of cards, decide what to hold, and every hand on the screen uses that identical hold while drawing its own replacement cards independently. The appeal is speed and action — instead of waiting for one draw to resolve before betting again, you're resolving dozens or hundreds of hands per round — but it also multiplies your bankroll swings proportionally, since you're now wagering a per-hand amount multiplied by the number of hands in play on every single round.

Crucially, the RTP of a multi-hand game is set entirely by the underlying variant and its specific pay table — a 100-hand 9/6 Jacks or Better game has the same 99.54% theoretical RTP as a single-hand 9/6 Jacks or Better game, because the odds of each individual hand haven't changed at all. What multi-hand does change is variance and pacing: results converge toward that theoretical RTP faster because you're generating far more hand outcomes per unit of time, but the bet-to-bankroll swings within any given round are larger because you're risking a multiplied stake on every decision. For a broader sense of how video poker's format flexibility compares to other casino games, see how video poker compares to slots generally, which covers pacing and variance differences between the two in more depth.

Progressive video poker: a jackpot layered on top

Progressive video poker adds one more layer that can sit on top of any of the variants above: a portion of every bet placed across a linked group of machines feeds a jackpot that keeps growing until a specific top hand — often a wild royal flush in a Deuces Wild-style game, or a sequential royal flush (meaning the five cards must land in a specific suit-and-order sequence) in some rarer formats — is hit. This works on the same basic principle as a progressive slot jackpot: the advertised pay table's RTP reflects only the jackpot's reset, minimum value, but as the pot grows from unclaimed contributions, the game's effective RTP rises above that baseline number, since the same rare hand now pays out considerably more than the pay table's printed figure until someone hits it and the jackpot resets.

Progressive video poker is a relatively small niche within the broader category rather than a dominant format, but it's worth recognizing when you see it, since the "effective RTP right now" and the "printed pay table RTP" are two different numbers on a progressive machine, and only the first one accounts for how large the jackpot has grown since its last reset.

Comparing the core variants at a glance

Putting the four most commonly played games side by side makes the pattern easier to hold in your head:

• Jacks or Better. No wilds, qualifying hand of a pair of Jacks or better, payouts spread relatively evenly across the hand hierarchy. Lowest variance of the four, the most extensively documented strategy chart, and the standard reference point every other variant is compared against.
• Deuces Wild. All four 2s wild, qualifying hand raised to three of a kind (two pair and lower typically pay nothing), payouts split into wild versus natural sub-categories for top hands. Full pay versions can exceed 100% RTP, but pay tables vary enormously between machines, making this the variant where checking the exact table matters most. Variance sits meaningfully above Jacks or Better because of how much the wild cards change hand frequency.
• Bonus Poker. Same skeleton as Jacks or Better with a boosted Four of a Kind payout, funded by a slightly lower Full House or Flush. A modest step up in variance from Jacks or Better — noticeable, but not dramatic.
• Double Double Bonus Poker. Steeply tiered, kicker-dependent Four of a Kind payouts funded by lower two pair, Full House, and Flush payouts. Highest variance of the four, since a large share of total return is concentrated in rare, specific four-of-a-kind-plus-kicker combinations rather than spread across frequent, modest hands.

Ranked purely by variance, low to high, these four run: Jacks or Better, then Bonus Poker, then Deuces Wild, then Double Double Bonus Poker — though the exact ordering between Bonus Poker and Deuces Wild can shift depending on the specific pay table each machine is running, which is yet another reason the printed pay table matters more than the variant's name alone.

How to choose which one to play

For a beginner, base Jacks or Better on a full-pay 9/6 table remains the standard recommended starting point, and it's recommended for two concrete reasons rather than just tradition. First, its lower variance means your bankroll experiences smoother swings while you're still building comfort with the pace and mechanics of the game. Second, because it's the most widely played variant, its strategy chart is the most extensively documented, tested, and explained resource in the entire category — how to play each hand correctly is built around exactly this logic, and starting here means you're learning from the deepest, most reliable body of strategy material available anywhere in video poker.

More experienced players often gravitate toward Deuces Wild or Double Double Bonus for different reasons entirely — Deuces Wild for its rare positive-expectation ceiling on a full-pay table, Double Double Bonus for the higher-variance, bigger-swing appeal of chasing kicker-boosted jackpots — but both of those preferences come with a hard prerequisite: learning the specific strategy chart built for that game's exact pay table, not applying Jacks or Better instincts to a fundamentally different pay structure. Jumping into Deuces Wild or Double Double Bonus without that specific knowledge tends to erase most or all of the mathematical edge these games can otherwise offer, since so much of their return depends on making the correct, sometimes counter-intuitive hold decision in situations that don't exist in Jacks or Better at all.

Frequently asked questions

Which video poker game has the best odds? It depends entirely on the specific pay table, not just the variant's name. Full Pay Deuces Wild (~100.76% RTP) and full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better (~99.54% RTP) are generally cited as the best mainstream options with perfect play, but both figures only apply to the specific "full pay" version of each game — a trimmed pay table on either can fall several points lower.

Is Deuces Wild better than Jacks or Better? Mathematically, a full-pay Deuces Wild table can out-return a full-pay Jacks or Better table, and it's one of the very few games where perfect play can produce a positive player edge. In practice, though, full-pay Deuces Wild machines are less common than full-pay Jacks or Better machines, the strategy is meaningfully different and less forgiving of guesswork, and a trimmed Deuces Wild pay table can easily underperform a good Jacks or Better table. "Better" depends on finding — and correctly playing — a genuinely full-pay version.

Do all casinos offer the same pay tables? No, and this is one of the most important things to internalize from this entire guide. Two machines can carry the identical variant name — "Jacks or Better," "Deuces Wild," "Double Double Bonus" — while paying meaningfully different RTPs, because operators adjust individual payout lines (Full House, Flush, Four of a Kind, and so on) to control the game's cost. Always check the specific pay table before playing for real stakes.

Does more variance mean worse odds? Not necessarily. Variance describes how bumpy your results are on the way to the long-run RTP, not the RTP itself. A high-variance game like Double Double Bonus can have a very competitive RTP on a good pay table — its return is just concentrated into fewer, bigger hits rather than spread evenly across frequent small ones, which changes how a session feels far more than it changes the underlying math.

What's the easiest variant to learn first? Jacks or Better, without much competition. It has no wild-card complications, the most straightforward qualifying hand in the category, and by far the most widely available and thoroughly explained strategy chart, making it the natural first stop before branching into wild-card or kicker-dependent games.

Why does Deuces Wild pay nothing on a pair or two pair? Because wild deuces make strong hands so much more common than they are in a non-wild game, the pay table has to raise its qualifying hand — typically to three of a kind — to keep the overall payout structure balanced. Paying out on a pair the way Jacks or Better does would make the game far too generous given how often wilds help players reach that threshold.

What does the "X/Y" shorthand on a Jacks or Better machine mean? It refers to the per-coin payout for a Full House and a Flush, in that order — a 9/6 machine pays 9-for-1 on a Full House and 6-for-1 on a Flush. Since most other hands in the pay table stay fixed across versions, this shorthand became the standard way to describe how generous a specific Jacks or Better table is at a glance.

Are kicker cards relevant in every variant? No — this is specific to the Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus family. In Jacks or Better, Bonus Poker, Deuces Wild, and Joker Poker, the payout for a four of a kind doesn't depend on the unrelated fifth card in your hand. In Double Double Bonus specifically, that kicker card can shift a hand into a much higher-paying tier, which is exactly what drives both its higher variance and its more complex strategy.

Can I use a Jacks or Better strategy chart on a different variant? Not reliably. Some holds carry over reasonably well between closely related games, like Jacks or Better and Bonus Poker, but wild-card games like Deuces Wild and Joker Poker, and kicker-dependent games like Double Double Bonus, each require their own dedicated strategy chart built for that exact pay table. Applying the wrong chart will cost you real expected value.

Is a royal flush always the top-paying hand? In non-wild games like Jacks or Better and Bonus Poker, yes. In wild-card games, a natural royal flush (no wilds involved) is usually the single biggest payout, with a "wild royal" — one completed using a wild card — paying a separate, lower amount, since it's a meaningfully more common event. Across most variants, royal flush pays around 800-for-1 at max coin (typically five coins) versus roughly 250-for-1 per coin below max, which is exactly why betting max coin matters so much in video poker generally.

Does playing a multi-hand format change my odds? No. The RTP of a multi-hand game — 3-hand, 10-hand, 52-hand, or 100-hand — is set entirely by the underlying variant and pay table you've chosen, not by the number of hands running simultaneously. What changes is variance and pacing: you'll see results converge toward the theoretical RTP faster since you're generating far more outcomes per round, but your bankroll swings within any single round are larger because your effective bet is multiplied across every hand in play.

What is a progressive video poker jackpot exactly? A jackpot that grows as a small portion of every bet across a linked set of machines is added to it, paid out only when a specific top hand is hit. Because the printed pay table's RTP only reflects the jackpot's minimum reset value, the game's real, current RTP is actually higher than that printed number once the jackpot has grown — right up until someone hits it and it resets.

Quick glossary reference

A handful of terms recur throughout this guide and across every variant covered here: pay table, full pay, wild card, qualifying hand, and variance. If any of these came up above and you want a precise, standalone definition, our full glossary covers the complete vocabulary in one place.

Where to go next

Once you have a sense of which variant family fits how you want to play — the steady, well-documented path of Jacks or Better, the wild-card math of Deuces Wild or Joker Poker, or the high-variance jackpot chasing of the Bonus Poker family — the next step is learning the strategy chart built specifically for that game and pay table, since a hold decision that's correct in one variant is very often wrong in another. From there, understanding exactly how a pay table converts into an RTP number, and how the industry's shorthand notation works across every variant in this family, will round out everything you need to choose a machine with confidence rather than guesswork.