Video Poker Cheat Sheet
7 Jacks or Better and 9 Deuces Wild printable strategy cards, covering 55 paytables across 2 games. Free PDFs, no email, no account. Every line on every card was generated from a solved table of all 134,459 distinct hands and checked against it, so each card prints the return it actually achieves and exactly how far that is from perfect play.
A strategy card is only right for the paytable it was built for. Read the full house and flush payouts off the machine before you use one: 9 and 6 is a different game from 8 and 5, and a multi-denomination machine can change paytable when you change the denomination.
The cards
| Paytable | Full card | Perfect play | Gap | Covers | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacks or Better | |||||
| 40-20-9-6-5 Jacks or Better | 99.5544% | 99.5599% | 0.0056 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/6 Jacks or Better | 99.5429% | 99.5439% | 0.0010 | 15 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/6 (500 RF) Jacks or Better | 98.8761% | 98.8793% | 0.0032 | 3 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/5 Jacks or Better | 98.4482% | 98.4498% | 0.0016 | 7 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/6 (1000 RF, 125 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) Jacks or Better | 94.7745% | 94.7760% | 0.0015 | 2 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/6 (500 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) Jacks or Better | 93.1944% | 93.2047% | 0.0103 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| 9/6 (1 2P) Jacks or Better | 86.6935% | 86.7072% | 0.0137 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| Deuces Wild | |||||
| Full Pay Deuces Wild | 100.6083% | 100.7620% | 0.1536 | 2 | Letter · A4 |
| 25/15/11/4/4/3 Deuces Wild | 99.7768% | 99.9569% | 0.1801 | 3 | Letter · A4 |
| 300/20/12/10/4/4/3 Deuces Wild | 99.2852% | 99.5123% | 0.2270 | 10 | Letter · A4 |
| 20/12/9/5/3/2 Deuces Wild | 98.7294% | 98.9378% | 0.2085 | 2 | Letter · A4 |
| 25/15/6/4/4/3 Deuces Wild | 97.5261% | 97.6386% | 0.1125 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| 20/12/10/4/4/3 Deuces Wild | 97.3767% | 97.5791% | 0.2025 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| Colorado Deuces Wild | 96.5524% | 96.7651% | 0.2126 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| 25/15/9/4/3/3 Deuces Wild | 96.1966% | 96.3433% | 0.1467 | 1 | Letter · A4 |
| 25/12/8/4/4/2 Deuces Wild | 95.4198% | 95.5856% | 0.1658 | 4 | Letter · A4 |
Using the wrong card, and what it costs
“Which card can I substitute?” is the question people ask in every video poker forum, and nobody answers it with numbers. This is the 38-line 9/6 card measured on every paytable it was not built for, the same way its own return is measured: the gap between what it returns on that machine and what perfect play returns there. Compare these with the hundredths of a point the card gives up on the paytable it is for. Carrying the wrong card is the expensive mistake; the last hundredth of strategy is not.
| Machine | Payouts | Gives up | Better card |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8/5 (55 SF) | 800-55-25-8-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0029 | 9/5 |
| 9/5 (55 SF) | 800-55-25-9-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0030 | 9/5 |
| 8/5 | 800-50-25-8-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0035 | 9/5 |
| 6/5 (35 4K) | 800-50-35-6-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0036 | 9/5 |
| 9/5 | 800-50-25-9-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0037 | 9/5 |
| 8/5 (30 4K) | 800-50-30-8-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0037 | 9/5 |
| 8/5 (35 4K) | 800-50-35-8-5-4-3-2-1 | 0.0040 | 9/5 |
| 9/6 (500 RF) | 500-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 0.0908 | 9/6 (500 RF) |
| 9/6 (1 2P) | 800-50-25-9-6-4-3-1-1 | 0.0913 | 9/6 (1 2P) |
| 9/6 (1000 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) | 1000-100-30-9-6-4-2-2-1 | 0.1056 | 9/6 (1000 RF, 125 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) |
| 9/6 (500 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) | 500-100-30-9-6-4-2-2-1 | 0.1321 | 9/6 (500 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) |
| 9/6 (1000 RF, 125 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) | 1000-125-30-9-6-4-2-2-1 | 0.1725 | 9/6 (1000 RF, 125 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) |
| 40-20-9-6-5 | 800-40-20-9-6-5-3-2-1 | 0.1808 | 40-20-9-6-5 |
| 9/6 (250 RF, 55 SF) | 250-55-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 0.2119 | 9/6 (500 RF) |
| 9/6 (250 RF) | 250-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 0.2137 | 9/6 (500 RF) |
What is on the card
Every PDF carries the same card at each trim it stays readable at — 5 × 7, 4 × 6 and 3.5 × 5 inches, all standard laminating-pouch sizes — front and back, largest first. A card with forty lines is only offered at the sizes where forty lines can still be read, because "too small" is the single most common complaint about every strategy card sold and shrinking one to fit would just reproduce it. Where the pocket size fits, there is also a sheet with the front and back side by side: cut one rectangle, fold once, laminate. No duplex printing and nothing to line up.
The front carries three things and nothing else:
- The paytable, at the top. All nine payouts, with the instruction to compare them against the glass. No strategy card sold prints the paytable it assumes, which means a buyer standing at a machine has no way to tell whether they have the right card.
- The hold order. One numbered column. Go down it and stop at the first line you can make from your five cards; hold exactly those. The right-hand column repeats how many cards that is, so you can confirm the play before you press draw.
- The return, and the gap. What the card gives up against perfect play, as a number, on the face of the card.
The back holds the four steps, the two terms the card uses, what the gap costs per hour, the other paytables the card is correct for, and where the numbers came from.
How the cards were made
Not by transcribing somebody else's chart. We hold a solved table of every distinct Jacks or Better hand — 4,033,770 rows, 134,459 hands across 30 paytables — that also powers the hand analyzer. Every hold pattern a card could name was priced against that table, the order of the lines was chosen by search to maximise the card's return, and lines that never earn their place were deleted. Two of them turned out to be worse than throwing all five cards away.
The return printed on each card is then measured, not estimated: the card is played against all 2,598,960 five-card deals and scored against the same solution. That is a single number rather than a range because every line is unambiguous — where one line fits a hand two ways, the card states the tie-break, so a program and a player reach the same hold.
The whole thing regenerates when the data changes. Our methodology covers how the rest of the site is computed.
Questions
Which paytable am I playing?
Read the full house and flush rows off the machine at one coin. Nine and six is full-pay Jacks or Better; eight and five is a different game on the same cabinet, and a Deuces Wild machine is read the same way off its own rows. Across the 55 paytables here, perfect play ranges from 86.7072% to 100.7620% — a spread far larger than any strategy error a card can save you from. Choosing the machine matters more than playing it perfectly, which is why the paytable is at the top of the card and not the bottom.
Does the card assume five coins?
Yes, and so does every return on this page. A royal flush pays 800 for one coin at five coins bet and 250 below that, so betting fewer than five costs about 1.4% of everything you put in — more than any strategy error the card can save you from.
Will this make video poker a winning game?
No. Every paytable listed here returns less than 100% at perfect play except the one that does not exist on a casino floor, and the card's job is to make a losing game lose as slowly as the machine allows. We publish the number on the card so you can see exactly what that is.
Also on this site
- Hand analyzer — any five cards, any paytable, the exact hold.
- All 30 paytables ranked by expected value.