Video Poker Return Calculator

Leave RTP at 99.5%, Hands at 1000, and Bet per Hand at $1.25. Those defaults model a five-coin Jacks or Better session at a quarter machine: five coins times $0.25 is $1.25, and 9/6 Jacks or Better with published perfect-strategy play returns about 99.54%, which the field rounds to 99.5%. Calculate. Expected Return is $1,243.75 and Expected Loss is $6.25. The handle — total amount cycled through the machine — is 1000 × $1.25 = $1,250.00. Return is handle times RTP: 1250 × 0.995 = 1243.75. Loss is the complement: 1250 − 1243.75 = 6.25.

Change RTP to 95.0% to see a typical full-pay versus short-pay gap. Same 1000 hands at $1.25 now return $1,187.50 and lose $62.50. That is ten times the expected leak of 9/6 Jacks or Better. A 8/5 Jacks or Better machine, a 6/5 machine, or a Deuces Wild that pays only 9-for-1 on a four-deuce hand instead of 15-for-1 will sit in that 95–97% band. The calculator does not know the paytable; you must type the published RTP for the exact game, denomination, and coin-in.

Hands scale linearly. Two thousand hands at the default bet and RTP double both the return ($2,487.50) and the expected loss ($12.50). They also double the variance, which this tool does not display. Video poker is not a slot with the same RTP. A royal flush that arrives once every 40,000-plus hands on Jacks or Better contributes several percentage points of the 99.5% return. Missing the royal in a 1,000-hand session is normal; the $6.25 expected loss can easily hide a $200 swing.

Bet per Hand should equal coins × denomination. A dollar 9/6 machine played max-coin is $5.00 per hand, not $1.25. One thousand hands then cycle $5,000 and expect to return $4,975, a $25 expected leak. Playing fewer than five coins on a machine that loads the royal only on max-coin destroys the RTP figure you typed, because the royal's contribution vanishes. Always confirm the paytable lights the 4000-coin (or 4000-credit) royal on the fifth coin before you trust 99.5%.

Read Expected Return as a mean, not a forecast of your next session. Dancer and Frome strategy charts exist because each dealt five-card hand has a ranking of discards that maximises that 99.5%. If you deviate — holding a low pair over four to a royal, for example — the RTP you entered is no longer the RTP you play. The calculator will still multiply your typed RTP by handle; it cannot audit your holds.

Video poker is five-card draw poker against a paytable, not against a dealer. The machine deals five cards from a 52-card deck, you discard any subset, and it redraws from the remaining 47. A posted schedule pays for pairs of jacks or better, two pair, trips, straight, flush, full house, quads, straight flush, and royal. The two numbers that define Jacks or Better are the full-house and flush pays: 9/6 means 9-for-1 on a full house and 6-for-1 on a flush, which, with a 4000-for-1 max-coin royal, yields approximately 99.54% under perfect strategy. That is the 99.5% default in this calculator.

The game is a child of the 1970s Si Redd / Fortune Coin era and of the 1980s paytable war that followed. Casinos discovered that a near-even game with a skill-looking decision attracted players who would never sit at a 1.4% pass-line, and then quietly shortened the full house from 9 to 8 to 7 to 6 while keeping the same glass art. Lenny Frome published the first widely circulated expected-value hold charts. Bob Dancer (and later Dancer & Daily) turned those charts into memorisable penalty-card rules that a human can execute at a hundred hands an hour. This calculator assumes you are in that camp. It is a return projector, not a trainer.

Variance is the reason two 99.5% games can feel unrelated. A 9/6 Jacks or Better royal is a 4,000-coin event with a frequency near 1 in 40,000 hands. A 96% video slot with a similar headline RTP usually spreads that return across medium-sized features. Over 1,000 hands the poker machine's standard deviation in units is several times the slot's. Expected Loss of $6.25 on $1,250 cycled is a mean; a 90th-percentile session can be fifty dollars in the hole without any "bad" holds. Bankroll advice that treats video poker like a low-volatility slot is using the wrong distribution.

Multi-play (Triple Play, Five Play, Ten Play, Fifty Play) deals several independent draws from the same initial five cards. RTP per hand stays 99.5% if the paytable does, but the covariance between lines that share the dealt hand inflates variance further. This tool treats Hands as independent single-play deals. If you play Ten Play, either multiply Hands by ten and accept that the variance is misstated, or treat each button-press as ten hands for the return figure only.

What the calculator will not do: rank your hold, detect a 7/5 game pretending to be 9/6, price a progressive royal, or apply a cash-back mailer. A 0.3% slot club plus a 9/6 game can push theoretical return above 100% for a rated player; type 99.8 or 100.1 as RTP if you have done that arithmetic yourself. The engine is a multiplication, not a paytable parser.

Video-poker return is a solved decision process summarised as a percentage, then scaled by handle. Expected return equals hands times stake times return-to-player over 100. Expected loss is handle minus that return. Defaults are 1000 hands, stake 1.25 dollars, return 99.5 percent, the rounded full-pay nine-six Jacks or Better figure. Handle is 1250. Return is 1000 times 1.25 times 0.995, which is 1243.75. Loss is 1250 minus 1243.75, which is 6.25. Lenny Frome's original strategy tables and Bob Dancer's later refinements are the commercial source of that 99.5, more precisely 99.54 percent before the input field rounds it. Full-pay royal is 800-for-1 at maximum coin: five coins in, four thousand coins back.

How the 99.54 is obtained. For each of the C(52,5) equal to 2,598,960 dealt five-card hands, optimal strategy chooses a discard subset that maximises the average paytable award over the reconstitutions from the remaining 47 cards. Summing those values weighted by deal probability, then dividing by the five-coin stake, produces the long-run return. Frome and Dancer differ on a handful of close holds, certain four-to-a-flush versus low-pair decisions, by amounts that move return in the fourth decimal. Eight-five Jacks or Better, by contrast, is commonly cited near 96 percent. Same 1000 times 1.25 handle at 96.0 percent: return 1200.00, loss 50.00. The extra 3.5 points of house edge cost 43.75 dollars more per thousand hands than nine-six. Over 40,000 hands, roughly the mean wait for a royal on Jacks or Better, that gap is 1,750 dollars on a quarter five-coin game.

Worked royal arithmetic belongs next to the mean. Maximum-coin royal at 800-for-1 on a 1.25-dollar five-coin stake is a 1000-dollar jackpot against a 1.25 debit, arriving with probability on the order of 1 in 40,000 under optimal hold. That single atom dominates the second moment even though it barely moves the first: expected loss over 1000 hands remains 6.25 while the standard deviation of the same 1000 hands sits in the tens of dollars. A slot advertising the same 99.5 percent with a tighter prize table would show a smaller spread. Do not use 6.25 as a session-budget ceiling; it is a centre of mass.

Assumptions. The 99.5 is an external input standing in for the solved hold map; this page does not re-enumerate 2.6 million deals. Penalty cards, machine-specific royal caps, and four-coin play that forfeits the 800-for-1 royal are not modelled. Playing one coin on a five-coin royal table collapses return by many points because the royal atom is mis-scaled. Deuces Wild and Double Bonus tables are different Markov processes with different published percentages; typing 99.5 on those games is a lie about the paytable.

History. Draw poker on video in the 1970s–80s made a complete-information hold problem that combinatorial writers could actually finish, unlike live seven-card stud. Frome's pamphlets and Dancer's later books are why nine-six Jacks or Better is the teaching full-pay. Hunt the paytable first. Scale handle second. The 6.25 leak on the defaults is what full-pay looks like when the royal is priced at 800-for-1 and the holds are optimal.