How Video Poker Pay Tables Work: A Casimatic Guide for Canadian Players

Video poker occupies a unique space on the casino floor — and increasingly on Canadian gambling platforms — because it combines the mechanical simplicity of a slot machine with a genuine skill component. Unlike slots, where the return-to-player percentage is hidden inside proprietary software, video poker machines display their pay tables openly on screen. Those pay tables are not decorative; they are mathematical contracts between the player and the house. Understanding them is the single most consequential thing a player can do before inserting a single dollar, because two machines sitting side by side in the same casino can carry return-to-player rates that differ by more than four percentage points, purely because of small differences in how the pay table is structured.

The Anatomy of a Video Poker Pay Table

Every video poker pay table lists hand rankings down the left column and coin multipliers across the top, typically for one through five coins played. The hands themselves follow standard poker rankings — royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, jacks or better — though the exact set of qualifying hands varies by game variant. What matters mathematically is not just which hands are listed, but the specific multipliers assigned to the full house and the flush, since those two hands occur frequently enough to have a measurable impact on the long-run return.

In Jacks or Better, the most widely distributed video poker variant in Canada and globally, the benchmark pay table is referred to as 9/6 — meaning nine coins returned per coin wagered on a full house, and six coins on a flush. A 9/6 Jacks or Better machine, when played with optimal strategy and maximum coins, returns approximately 99.54 percent to the player over the long run. That figure comes from combinatorial analysis of all possible five-card draw outcomes across a 52-card deck. Casinos frequently deploy 8/5 or 8/6 variants instead, which reduce the return to around 97.3 percent and 98.4 percent respectively. Those differences sound small, but over thousands of hands they translate into meaningfully higher expected losses per session.

The royal flush payout is also structurally significant. On most machines, a royal flush pays 800-for-1 when five coins are wagered, but only 250-for-1 at lower coin levels. This asymmetry is intentional. Because the royal flush accounts for roughly 1.98 percent of the total return on a 9/6 Jacks or Better machine, playing fewer than five coins effectively removes nearly two percentage points from the return. Canadian players who prefer lower-denomination machines should select a machine where the maximum coin bet fits their bankroll, rather than playing fewer coins on a higher-denomination unit.

How Pay Table Variations Affect Strategy

Pay table differences do not merely change the return percentage in the abstract — they change the mathematically correct strategy for specific hands. This is a point that many casual players miss entirely. In a Deuces Wild game, for example, the wild card fundamentally restructures hand frequencies, and the pay table must compensate by eliminating payouts for hands as strong as two pair. A Deuces Wild machine that pays nothing for two pair is not being stingy; it is accounting for the fact that two pair occurs far more often when four wild cards are in the deck. The full-pay Deuces Wild table, sometimes called NSU Deuces Wild, returns approximately 100.76 percent with optimal play — one of the few casino games with a theoretical positive expectation for the player.

Double Double Bonus Poker, which became widespread in North American casinos during the late 1990s and early 2000s, introduced tiered payouts for four-of-a-kind hands based on the rank of the cards involved. Four aces with a kicker of 2, 3, or 4 pays 400 coins per coin wagered on a full-pay version, compared to 25 coins for four 5s through kings. This structure forces strategy adjustments: holding a low kicker alongside three aces becomes correct in situations where standard Jacks or Better strategy would call for discarding it. Players who import Jacks or Better strategy into Double Double Bonus without adjustment are making systematic errors that cost them roughly 0.5 to 1.5 percent in expected return per session.

Resources that explain how to read a video poker pay table consistently emphasize that the first step before sitting down is identifying the variant and then locating the full house and flush payouts to classify the machine against known benchmarks. Casimatic and similar Canadian-focused platforms have published comparison guides for this reason — not to steer players toward particular machines, but because a player who cannot identify a 9/5 Jacks or Better machine versus a 9/6 machine is operating without information that is freely available and directly relevant to their expected outcome.

Regulatory Context for Canadian Players

Canada’s gambling regulatory environment is administered provincially, which creates meaningful variation in the video poker landscape across the country. British Columbia Lottery Corporation, Ontario Lottery and Gaming, and the Alberta Gaming, Liquor and Cannabis Commission each set their own minimum return standards for electronic gaming devices. In British Columbia, for instance, the BCLC has historically required a minimum return of 75 percent on slot machines, but video poker machines — because they incorporate a skill element — are typically held to different standards and in practice tend to offer higher returns than minimum-compliance slots.

The launch of Ontario’s regulated iGaming market in April 2022 introduced a new dynamic. Licensed operators under iGaming Ontario are required to publish RTP information for their games, and video poker titles from software suppliers such as IGT, Scientific Games, and Konami are now available on regulated platforms alongside their land-based counterparts. The published RTPs for these digital versions typically match the full-pay land-based equivalents, though players should verify this against the specific pay table displayed in the game interface rather than relying solely on the operator’s stated RTP figure, which may represent an average across multiple pay table configurations offered by that title.

One practical implication for Canadian online players is that the pay table visible on screen is the authoritative source, not the game title. A game marketed as “Jacks or Better” by one operator may use a 9/6 pay table while the same game title at another operator uses an 8/5 configuration. The title does not change; the math does. Casimatic’s coverage of the Ontario iGaming market has noted this inconsistency in several game audits, and it underscores why pay table literacy matters more in the online environment than in a physical casino, where floor staff are sometimes available to confirm machine configurations.

Bankroll Implications of Pay Table Selection

Beyond the theoretical return percentage, pay table structure affects the variance of a video poker game, which in turn has direct implications for how large a bankroll a player needs to withstand normal downswings. Double Bonus and Double Double Bonus variants concentrate more of their return in high-value four-of-a-kind hands, which occur less frequently than full houses and flushes. This means longer dry stretches between significant payouts, even when the player is executing correct strategy. A full-pay Double Double Bonus Poker machine returns approximately 98.98 percent with optimal play — slightly below 9/6 Jacks or Better — but its variance is substantially higher. Simulation studies suggest that a player needs roughly three to four times the bankroll to have equivalent session survival probability on Double Double Bonus compared to 9/6 Jacks or Better at the same denomination.

For Canadian players playing at $0.25 denomination with five coins per hand — a $1.25 bet — the difference between a 99.54 percent and a 97.3 percent return amounts to approximately $2.24 in expected loss per 100 hands on the lower-return machine. At a typical video poker pace of 400 to 600 hands per hour, that scales to between $8.96 and $13.44 per hour in additional expected loss simply from playing the wrong machine. Over a four-hour session, the pay table selection alone could account for $35 to $54 in the difference between two machines sitting in the same casino. Casimatic’s analytical approach to game selection is rooted in exactly this kind of per-session cost comparison, which makes the abstract concept of return percentage concrete and actionable.

Understanding video poker pay tables is not a peripheral skill for serious players — it is foundational. The information is displayed openly on every machine precisely because regulators and manufacturers are required to make it available. A player who can identify a full-pay machine, adjust their strategy to the specific pay table in front of them, and size their bets to match the denomination that keeps maximum-coin play within their bankroll has already done more to improve their expected outcome than any betting system or superstition could offer. The math is fixed, the pay table is public, and the decisions belong entirely to the player.