Wizard of Odds intermediate strategy

Twenty-five lines. Adds the straight-flush types, one inside-straight line, and the interleaving of suited tens with unsuited high cards. Played through every one of the 2,598,960 possible deals on a full-pay 9/6 machine, this chart returns exactly 99.5424% against 99.5439% for perfect play — a gap of 0.0015 percentage points, or $0.01 an hour at quarters and $0.04 an hour at dollars.

Source

Jacks or Better Intermediate Strategy (9/6), Michael Shackleford, Wizard of Odds. Transcribed 2026-09-19. The source quotes 99.52% for this chart; exhaustive enumeration of the list as published gives 99.5424%.

• The page's own comparison table totals 0.995176 and every cell of it is byte-identical to the Internet Archive's capture of 2005-07-17, while the ranked list beside it grew from 24 rows to 25 between 2006-05 and 2007-05. The quoted 99.52% was computed for a list the page stopped publishing nineteen years ago; see WIZARD_INTERMEDIATE_2005.
• Its introduction says 'the simple strategy will cost 0.03%'; it means this strategy.

The chart

Read it top down and hold the first line your hand matches. A high card means a jack, queen, king or ace.

Where it differs from perfect play

6,180 deals are played differently from the exact solution — 0.24% of hands, in 7 kinds. They are listed costliest first, with the share of the whole 0.0015-point gap each one carries and the running total. The example is the single worst hand in that class.

The worst hand in each class

"Worth" is the exact expected value of that hold in coins per coin bet, over all the ways the draw can come out of the remaining 47 cards. You can check any of them in the hand analyzer.

On the other standard machines

The chart was written for 9/6 and is applied unchanged to the rest, which is what a player does. Cost per hour assumes 600 hands an hour at five quarters a hand.

Other charts