What I want from a video poker session
Video poker is the game I play when I want blackjack-level house edge without the social pressure of a live table. No dealer watching my decisions, no other players waiting for me to act, no chat box filling with complaints when I hit a 12 against a 2. I sit at my desk, open a video poker machine, and play at my own pace. The house edge on a full-pay Jacks or Better machine is 0.46 percent with perfect strategy, which is fractionally better than blackjack. The catch is that perfect video poker strategy is harder to learn than basic blackjack strategy, and most UK online casinos do not offer the full-pay paytables that produce that 0.46 percent edge.
I play video poker primarily at Skill On Net brands (Luna Casino, Swift Casino) because their NetEnt and Microgaming video poker machines have published paytables that I can verify before playing. The game selection is narrower than the slot selection, typically five to ten variants at most casinos, but the ones I care about are Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild. All American Poker and Joker Poker are also available at some casinos, but I stick to the variants where I have memorised the strategy chart and can play without referencing a guide every hand.
Bankroll plan
My video poker bankroll is £50 per session. I play five-coin maximum bet at the lowest coin denomination available, which is typically 5 pence at most UK video poker machines. Five coins at 5 pence each is 25 pence per hand. This gives me two hundred hands of bankroll, which at my playing speed of about three hundred hands per hour lasts roughly forty minutes. The expected loss on two hundred hands at 25 pence each (total wagered £50) with a 99 percent RTP is about 50 pence. In practice, variance means I either lose my bankroll or finish up, and the former happens more often because perfect strategy is hard to maintain for two hundred consecutive hands.
I never play fewer than five coins. This is the single most important video poker rule. The royal flush payout on a five-coin bet is typically 4,000 coins (an 800:1 return). On a four-coin bet, the royal flush pays proportionally less, which means the expected return drops because the royal flush represents about 2 percent of the total return on a full-pay machine. Playing four coins instead of five reduces your effective RTP by roughly 1.5 percent. If you cannot afford five coins at the minimum denomination, find a lower denomination machine rather than playing fewer coins.
The rules I follow
I play only Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, and only machines where the paytable is clearly displayed in the game information. The full-pay Jacks or Better paytable is 9/6, meaning a full house pays 9 coins and a flush pays 6 coins per coin bet. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine with five-coin maximum bet has an RTP of 99.54 percent. An 8/5 machine has an RTP of 97.3 percent. A 7/5 machine has an RTP of 96.15 percent. The difference between 9/6 and 7/5 is 3.39 percent in expected return, which is the difference between a game that is roughly fair and a game that is worse than European roulette.
I check the paytable before every session, even at casinos where I have played before. Operators can change the paytable without notice, and a 9/6 machine can become an 8/5 machine with a software update. I have seen this happen. I opened a Jacks or Better machine at a casino where I had previously recorded the 9/6 paytable, and the flush payout had dropped from 6 to 5. I closed the game immediately. Checking the paytable takes twenty seconds. Playing a reduced paytable for an hour costs real money.
I play with a strategy chart visible. Video poker strategy is not intuitive. The correct play for a hand like Kc, Qc, 4c, 8h, 2d in Jacks or Better is to hold Kc and Qc (two to a royal flush) rather than the three to a flush or just the high cards. I do not have every edge case memorised, and I do not think anyone realistically does. The casinos do not mind if you use a strategy chart. The UKGC’s technical standards do not prohibit reference materials during play.
RTP and house edge
Full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better: 99.54 percent RTP, 0.46 percent house edge. Full-pay Deuces Wild: 100.76 percent RTP, meaning the player has a theoretical edge of 0.76 percent with perfect play. I have never found a full-pay Deuces Wild machine at a UK online casino. The best Deuces Wild paytable I have seen in the UK is 98.91 percent RTP, which is still excellent but not player-positive. The 100.76 percent Deuces Wild variant exists primarily in Nevada land-based casinos and possibly at a few offshore online casinos, but UKGC technical standards and operator margins make it vanishingly unlikely you will find a player-positive video poker machine at a UK-licensed casino.
The gap between theoretical RTP and actual session results is larger for video poker than for blackjack because the royal flush contributes a significant portion of the total return. On a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine, the royal flush accounts for about 1.98 percent of the total 99.54 percent return. Over the course of a single two hundred-hand session, you will probably not hit a royal flush (the odds are roughly 1 in 40,000 hands). This means your effective session RTP is lower than the theoretical RTP in most sessions, offset by the occasional session where you hit a royal and the return spikes above 100 percent. The variance is extreme. I have played over five thousand hands of video poker across my testing career and have hit exactly one royal flush.
Top machines I play
I play Jacks or Better exclusively at Luna Casino and Swift Casino, both Skill On Net brands that run NetEnt video poker with published 9/6 paytables as of my most recent check in June 2026. The NetEnt interface is clean: large cards, clear hold buttons, and a paytable that is accessible from a single tap on the information icon. BetMaze (ProgressPlay) offers Microgaming video poker, which includes Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild. I verified the 9/6 Jacks or Better paytable at BetMaze, but the Deuces Wild paytable was the reduced 98.91 percent variant.
DAZN Bet offers Playtech video poker, which I have tested once. The Playtech Jacks or Better machine ran at 8/5 (97.3 percent RTP), which is playable but not ideal. The game selection includes several variants I have not seen at NetEnt or Microgaming casinos, including Aces and Faces and Double Bonus Poker. The paytables on those variants were also below full-pay, but the variety may appeal if you want something other than Jacks or Better and are willing to accept the lower RTP.
Mistakes I made
I played a Deuces Wild machine for about a hundred hands before I noticed the natural royal flush payout was 125 coins per coin bet instead of 250. This reduced the RTP by about 1.5 percent. I had assumed the paytable was the standard 25/15/9/5/3/2 variant because that is the most common online Deuces Wild paytable. I was wrong. The machine was running a reduced paytable that I did not recognise, and I did not check because I was overconfident. Always check the full paytable, not just the full house and flush payouts, before you play your first hand.
Another mistake: I played video poker at a casino that did not publish the paytable in the game information. The help file listed the general rules but not the specific payouts for each hand rank. I played anyway, assuming the paytable was standard. After the session, I contacted the casino’s support team and asked for the paytable. They took three days to respond and the response was a generic “the game RTP is published on our website” with no specific paytable. I have not played video poker at that casino since. If the paytable is not visible in the game, assume it is not full-pay and play elsewhere.
Bottom line
Video poker offers some of the best odds in the casino for a player who is willing to learn the strategy and verify the paytable before every session. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine with perfect play gives a house edge of 0.46 percent, which is fractionally better than blackjack. The trade-off is that perfect play requires memorising a strategy chart with dozens of edge cases, and full-pay machines are increasingly rare at UK online casinos. I play video poker when I want a quiet, fast game with good odds, and I always check the paytable before the first hand.
