Aces and Faces Strategy Guide

What makes Aces and Faces different

Most bonus-style video poker variants boost four-of-a-kind payouts, but they usually concentrate the biggest bonus on a single rank — typically Aces. Aces and Faces takes a different approach: it pays a boosted rate for four Aces, and it separately pays a boosted rate for four face cards — Jacks, Queens, and Kings — as their own distinct tier, different in structure from a game like Double Bonus Poker, which mainly singles out Aces alone. Number-card quads (2s through 10s) pay at a lower, more standard rate. That structural split is the entire reason Aces and Faces strategy deviates from Jacks or Better strategy in a handful of specific spots. For how this variant fits alongside its relatives, see video poker variants explained.

Why this changes three-of-a-kind decisions

Because Aces and four-of-a-kind face cards both carry boosted payouts here, a three-of-a-kind hand built from an Ace or a face card is worth slightly more, in expected-value terms, than the identical hand shape built from a number card. This doesn't change whether you hold three of a kind — that's already correct in every mainstream variant — but it does mean that in situations where you're choosing between two similarly-shaped holds, one built around Aces or face cards should be weighted more heavily than one built around a 2 through 10, because the payout for completing quads on the higher-tier ranks is meaningfully larger.

This subtlety doesn't exist in Jacks or Better, where every four-of-a-kind pays the same flat rate regardless of rank. In Jacks or Better, a three-of-a-kind decision is purely about hand shape and draw odds; in Aces and Faces, the rank itself carries extra weight because the payout ceiling differs depending on what you're chasing.

Where this shows up in practice

The clearest practical case is a pair-versus-pair or trips-versus-trips comparison where the cards themselves are otherwise similar in drawing potential. If you're weighing two holds that are close in expected value under a flat pay structure, and one involves an Ace or a face card while the other involves a number card, the Ace or face-card hold usually pulls ahead once you factor in the boosted quad tier it's drawing toward. The gap isn't enormous in most single-decision spots, but it's real, and it's the specific adjustment that separates Aces and Faces strategy from a straight copy of Jacks or Better strategy applied to a different pay table.

It's worth being clear about the limits of this adjustment: it doesn't override the core hold hierarchy. A four-card royal draw still beats a made three of a kind regardless of rank. A four-to-a-flush draw still generally outranks a low pair regardless of which ranks are involved. The Aces-and-faces weighting only matters when you're already comparing two options that are close enough in value that rank-based payout differences can tip the decision.

Worked example

Say you're comparing two hypothetical hands with similar shapes: one is J♠ J♥ J♣ 6♦ 2♠ (trip Jacks with two disconnected kickers), and the other is 6♠ 6♥ 6♣ J♦ 2♠ (trip 6s with two disconnected kickers, including a stray Jack). In both cases the correct play is to hold the three-of-a-kind and draw two fresh cards — that part doesn't change. But the expected value of the Jacks hand is higher than the expected value of the 6s hand in Aces and Faces specifically, because completing four Jacks pays at the boosted face-card tier while completing four 6s pays at the lower standard rate. In a flat-payout game like Jacks or Better, these two hands would have identical expected value from the trips alone, aside from very minor differences in how the kickers interact with the deck. In Aces and Faces, the rank of the three-of-a-kind itself becomes part of the value calculation, not just an afterthought.

Why this happens: the math behind the weighting

The underlying reason is straightforward expected value math: EV is the probability-weighted average payout across every way a hold's draw could complete, and when the payout for one specific completion (quad Jacks, quad Aces) is structurally larger than another (quad 6s), that difference flows directly into the hold's overall EV, even though the probability of completing the draw is identical in both cases. Aces and Faces is a clean illustration of how pay-table structure, not just hand shape, drives correct strategy — the same principle covered in more general terms in the video poker strategy guide and in video poker hand rankings explained.

How this compares to other bonus-style variants

It's worth placing Aces and Faces in context against its closer relatives. Bonus Poker and Double Bonus Poker mainly single out Aces for a boosted quad payout, treating face cards the same as number cards outside of that one exception. Double Double Bonus goes a different direction entirely, adding kicker-dependent tiers that make the identity of a specific fifth card matter. Aces and Faces sits between these approaches structurally — it doesn't care about kickers the way Double Double Bonus does, but it splits its quad bonus across two separate rank groups (Aces, and face cards as a block) rather than concentrating everything on Aces alone the way Bonus Poker and Double Bonus do. That's a genuinely different shape of pay table, and it's why a player who has only learned Double Bonus strategy can't assume it transfers directly here.

A note on pair decisions

The same rank-weighting logic extends, in a smaller way, to pair-versus-pair comparisons below the three-of-a-kind level. When a hand offers a genuinely close choice between holding a low pair and pursuing some other draw, the presence of a face-card pair instead of a number-card pair doesn't flip a clearly-wrong hold into a clearly-right one — the core hierarchy from Jacks or Better strategy still governs the vast majority of these decisions. But in the rare situations where two competing holds are already close enough in expected value that hand shape alone doesn't settle it, knowing that face cards and Aces carry extra weight in this specific pay table is the tiebreaker worth reaching for.

The overall takeaway

Aces and Faces strategy is Jacks or Better strategy with one added layer of judgment: when a decision is otherwise close, favor the hold built from Aces or face cards over one built from number cards, because the boosted quad tiers make that hold worth more even at identical odds of completion. Everything else — the royal flush priority, the two-pair and high-pair rules, the flush-draw-versus-low-pair comparisons — carries over from standard strategy essentially unchanged.