Video Poker Trainer

Play 9/6 Jacks or Better — or any of our 30 paytables — and be told, on every single hand, what the optimal hold was, what you actually held, and the exact number of credits the difference cost you — and a running score of what your decisions so far imply your return actually is. The answers come from a complete solve of the game, not a strategy chart, and everything runs in your browser. No account, no download, no limit, on any of the paytables.

What the solver would have done

Show all 32 ways to play that hand

This session

Reset counters

Nothing on this page is stored or sent anywhere. Reload and the counters are gone, because there is no account to keep them in.

Watch the strategy return, not the credits

The credit counter is noise. A royal flush arrives about once in 40,391 hands and is worth 800 coins when it does, so a session of a few thousand hands is decided almost entirely by whether one turned up. A player who finishes ahead has learned nothing about whether they played well.

The expected value of the decisions is not noisy. Each hand has an exactly best hold worth a known number of credits, and the hold you chose is worth another known number; the gap is a debt incurred the moment you pressed draw, whatever the draw then did. Add those up, divide by the coins you have wagered, subtract from the paytable's perfect-play return, and you have the return your strategy earns. That figure is stable after a few hundred hands, and it is the one the trainer puts in bold.

Where the credits actually go

The mistakes people make in video poker are not scattered. They cluster on a small number of hand shapes where the intuitive play and the correct play differ, and a player who makes one of them makes it every time it appears. The usual suspects: breaking a made flush or straight to draw at a royal, keeping a low pair over three to a royal (or the reverse, depending on the paytable), holding a kicker with a high pair, and keeping three high cards when two of them would be better. Our write-ups on the royal trap and fourteen counterintuitive plays go through the ones that cost the most, and the trainer's session list ranks yours by credits lost.

The paytable changes the answer

A strategy learned on 9/6 is not correct on 8/5. When the full house and flush payouts drop, made hands are worth less relative to the royal chase, and a handful of borderline holds flip. That is why the trainer grades against the paytable in the dropdown rather than against a single chart, and why the paytable selector resets the counters when you change it — a mixed session measures nothing. Every one of our 30 paytable pages links straight back into the trainer with that paytable loaded.

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.
• Any hold we call optimal can be checked hand by hand against any exact video poker calculator, including the analyzer on this site, which reads the same solved table by a different route. If you find a hand where we disagree with a solver you trust, that is a bug and we want to hear about 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.

What it does not do

There is no money here, no prize, no wager, no deposit, and no link to anywhere you could place one. There is no account, no leaderboard and no saved progress, because there is no server to keep any of it on. If that costs us the ability to show you last week's accuracy, it also means there is nothing to harvest.

Frequently asked questions

How does the trainer know the right play?

It is not a rule list and not an approximation. Every distinct Jacks or Better hand was solved in advance — 134,459 cases per paytable after collapsing the suits — and the answers ship to your browser as a small binary file. The optimal hold you are shown is looked up, not estimated, so it is right on the awkward hands where published strategy charts disagree with each other.

What does "your strategy returns 99.1%" mean?

It is the return you would earn over the long run playing the way you have been playing, and it is the only number on the page worth watching. It starts at the paytable's perfect-play figure — 99.544% on 9/6 Jacks or Better — and every mistake subtracts the expected value that mistake cost, divided by the coins you have wagered. Unlike your credit balance it is not luck: it settles down after a few hundred hands instead of a few hundred thousand.

Why does the trainer make me bet five coins?

Because the solved strategy is the max-coin strategy. Below five coins the royal flush pays a quarter of its top rate, which shifts the correct play on a handful of hands, so grading a four-coin hand against the five-coin solution would mark some correct plays wrong. Playing short coins is itself the biggest mistake available in video poker, so the trainer simply does not offer it.

I held the right cards and it still called it a mistake. Why?

It should not, and ties are handled: two holds worth exactly the same are both correct and neither is flagged. If a play you are confident in is being marked wrong, check the paytable in the dropdown — the correct play genuinely differs between paytables, which is most of the reason this tool exists. You can also press "show all 32 ways to play that hand" and read the expected value of every alternative.

Does it cost anything, or need an account?

No to both. No signup, no email, no free-trial hand limit, no advertisement for a casino. Nothing you do here is stored or sent anywhere — the counters live in the page and vanish when you reload it.

How many hands should I practise?

Enough that your accuracy stops improving, which for most people is a few thousand. Watch the mistake list rather than the total: errors in video poker are systematic, not random, and almost everybody is losing the same fraction of a percent over and over on the same three or four hand shapes.

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