Free Video Poker Simulator
A real Jacks or Better machine, in the browser, with no money in it. Pick any of our 30 paytables, bet one to five credits, hold what you like and draw. Every payout is the one that paytable actually pays, and the simulator can tell you the mathematically optimal hold for any hand the instant you have played it.
| Hand | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 250 | 500 | 750 | 1,000 | 4,000 |
| Straight Flush | 50 | 100 | 150 | 200 | 250 |
| Four of a Kind | 25 | 50 | 75 | 100 | 125 |
| Full House | 9 | 18 | 27 | 36 | 45 |
| Flush | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 8 | 12 | 16 | 20 |
| Three of a Kind | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| Two Pair | 2 | 4 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| Jacks or Better | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Press Deal for five cards. Nothing here costs anything and nothing is stored.
What the solver would have done
This session
What makes this one different
Free video poker is not hard to find, and some of it is very good: there are sites that will tell you the expected value of all thirty-two ways to play a hand, correctly, without asking who you are. What is consistently missing is the step after that. Being told "that is not the best play" is not being told what the best play was, what yours was worth, or what the difference cost — and almost nowhere keeps a count. The tools that do the arithmetic and hold the score want an account and a subscription for it.
We have those parts because the game is solved and we did the solving. Jacks or Better has 2,598,960 possible deals, but most are the same problem in different suits: a four-card heart flush plays exactly like a four-card spade flush. Relabelling the suits collapses them into 134,459 genuinely distinct cases, and the optimal hold and expected value for every one of them, on every one of our 30 paytables, is precomputed and shipped to your browser as about 270 KB of binary per paytable. So the answer is not a rule list approximating the strategy. It is the answer, looked up, with no server involved.
On top of that, the coach prices your hold as well as the best one, which a lookup table cannot do — it enumerates every one of the 1,533,939 possible draws behind the cards you kept and averages the result. That is what turns "you should have kept the king" into "that play cost you 0.34 credits".
The shuffle
Cards are drawn with crypto.getRandomValues, the browser's cryptographic random source, and dealt
with a Fisher-Yates shuffle. Converting a random 32-bit number into a card by taking the remainder would make
the first few cards very slightly more likely than the rest, so values in the incomplete final block are
discarded and redrawn instead. The replacement cards on the draw come off the same 47 that are left, exactly
as a real machine does, which is why the expected values on this site apply to what you are playing here.
Bet five coins
On 9/6 Jacks or Better the royal flush pays 250 per coin until the fifth coin and then 800. Because a royal turns up roughly once in 40,391 hands under optimal play, that one step is worth about 1.36 percentage points of return — more than the difference between several of the paytables in the dropdown. Betting one coin five times is strictly worse than betting five coins once. The simulator pays the short royal below max coins so you can watch it happen.
How to check this
We publish as Voitto Virta LLC and there is no expert's name on this page, so nothing here asks you to take our word for it. Everything the tool does rests on numbers you can verify against any other source, and the ones worth checking first are these.
- 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.5439% at optimal play, from the payout string 800-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1. Every published analysis of this machine rounds to 99.54%. If ours did not, the rest of the page would not be worth reading.
- A royal flush arrives once in 40,391 hands under that strategy, and contributes 1.98 percentage points of the machine's whole return.
- The paytable on screen is the one being paid. Every payout the machine makes comes from the row you can see, multiplied by the coins bet, with the royal short-paid below max coins exactly as a real machine does it.
- Two independent implementations have to agree before this ships. The optimal hold comes from a precomputed solve of all 134,459 distinct hands per paytable; the cost of your own hold is computed a completely different way, by enumerating every one of the 1,533,939 possible draws behind it. Our build runs both over thousands of random hands on several of the 30 paytables and fails if they disagree by more than the precision the tables are stored at. A simulator that disagreed with our own solver would be worse than no simulator.
Practise at home, not at a machine
A strategy card printed on paper is sold in casino gift shops. Consulting a phone at a machine is a different thing. Nevada NRS 465.075 makes it unlawful to use, or possess with intent to use, any electronic device designed or programmed to obtain an advantage at a game in a licensed establishment — and it names, among the things such a device might do, analysing the probability of an event in the game and analysing the strategy for playing it. That is a plain description of this page. Other jurisdictions have their own rules and their own enforcement.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. It is simply what this tool is for: practice at home, so that at the machine you are reading your own memory rather than a screen.
Practise a specific paytable
Each of our 30 paytable pages links straight into the machine with that paytable loaded, and the dropdown above does the same thing by hand. The spread across the set is wide:
| Paytable | Payout string | Return at optimal play | Practise |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/6 (976 RF) Jacks or Better | 976-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 100.000% | Play it |
| 9/6 (90 SF) Jacks or Better | 800-90-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 99.996% | Play it |
| 9/6 (940 RF) Jacks or Better | 940-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 99.903% | Play it |
| 9/6 (900 RF) Jacks or Better | 900-50-25-9-6-4-3-2-1 | 99.798% | Play it |
| 8/5 (35 4K) Jacks or Better | 800-50-35-8-5-4-3-2-1 | 99.661% | Play it |
| 9/6 (1000 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) Jacks or Better | 1000-100-30-9-6-4-2-2-1 | 94.436% | Play it |
| 9/6 (500 RF, 100 SF, 30 4K, 2 Trips) Jacks or Better | 500-100-30-9-6-4-2-2-1 | 93.205% | Play it |
| 9/6 (1 2P) Jacks or Better | 800-50-25-9-6-4-3-1-1 | 86.707% | Play it |
Frequently asked questions
- Is this video poker simulator really free?
- Yes, and there is nothing to sign up for or install. It runs entirely in your browser, there is no account, no email, no timer, no credit pack to buy and no link to a real-money casino anywhere on the page. The credits are imaginary.
- Are the cards actually random?
- Every card comes from
crypto.getRandomValues, the random number generator your browser exposes for cryptography, dealt through an unbiased Fisher-Yates shuffle with rejection sampling so that no card is even fractionally more likely than another. The code that does it is documented on this page and readable in the page source. That is "provably fair" in the sense of documented and checkable — not the commitment-scheme sense a crypto casino means. - Which paytable should I practise on?
- The one on the machine you are going to play. Paytables change the correct strategy, not just the return: 9/6 (976 RF) Jacks or Better at 100.00% and 9/6 (1 2P) Jacks or Better at 86.71% are 13.3 percentage points apart, and some hands are played differently on each. All 30 are in the dropdown.
- Why does betting fewer than five coins pay less per coin?
- Because that is how the machines work. The royal flush pays 250 per coin for the first four coins and 800 per coin on the fifth, so playing short coins gives up about 1.36 percentage points of return on 9/6 Jacks or Better for nothing. The simulator reproduces this exactly rather than hiding it, because it is the most expensive avoidable mistake in the game.
- Can I win real money here?
- No. There is no cash, no prize, no wager and no way to deposit. This is a maths tool for learning a game whose correct play is fully solved, and we do not link to anywhere you could bet.
- What is the difference between this and the trainer?
- The simulator is the machine: play at any bet, on any paytable, at your own pace. The trainer is the same machine with the coach locked on and the bet locked at max coins, plus the running score of how much expected value your decisions have cost you.