40-20-9-6-5 Jacks or Better Strategy Card

A free printable strategy card for the 800-40-20-9-6-5-3-2-1 paytable. Followed exactly it returns 99.5544% of everything you bet, against 99.5599% for perfect play — a gap of 0.0056 percentage points, or one five-coin bet every 17,895 hands. That number is measured over all 2,598,960 deals, not estimated.

Download

Each PDF holds the card at every trim it stays readable at, front and back, largest first — the full card at 5 x 7 in or 4 x 6 in, the short card at 5 x 7 in, 4 x 6 in or 3.5 x 5 in. All of them are standard laminating-pouch sizes. Where the 3.5 × 5 fits there is also a cut-and-fold sheet that needs no duplex printing. Free, no email, generated 2026-09-22.

The paytable this card assumes

The hold order, in full

This is what is printed on the front of the full card. Read down; hold the first line your five dealt cards can make. Where one line fits your hand two ways, take the one with more high cards, and if that ties, the lower cards.

Never hold these

Each one is worth less than throwing all five cards away on this paytable. They are absent from the card because they were priced and lost, not because they were forgotten.

• 3 to a flush

Using this card on a machine it is not for

Sometimes the machine in front of you is not the one you printed for. This is the 40-20-9-6-5 full card measured on every other paytable we hold, worst first — the gap between what it returns there and what perfect play returns there. The five worst are the ones to avoid; each of them has its own card on this site.

The short card

The same derivation with a line budget: 22 lines instead of 39, set large enough to read in bad light, at a cost of 0.1654 points instead of 0.0056. Whether that trade is worth it is yours to make, which is why both numbers are printed on both cards.

More

• All 16 strategy cards
• Hand analyzer — any five cards, the exact optimal hold
• 40-20-9-6-5 hand probabilities and expected value