Video Poker Expected Value (EV) Explained
What this guide covers
Every video poker strategy chart is, underneath the surface, a table of expected value comparisons — but "EV" is a term that gets used constantly without much explanation of what it actually means or how it's derived. This guide breaks down expected value as a concept, walks through a simplified worked example, and explains why the "correct" play in video poker is defined by EV rather than by chasing the biggest possible win or the highest chance of winning something. For applying this concept directly at the table, see the video poker strategy guide; for tools that do this calculation automatically, see how to use a video poker strategy calculator.
What expected value actually means
Expected value is a probability-weighted average — the sum, across every possible outcome of a decision, of that outcome's probability multiplied by its payout. It answers a specific question: if you made this exact decision an enormous number of times, what would your average result be per decision?
This is different from asking "what's the most likely single outcome" or "what's the best possible outcome." EV blends every possible result — the frequent small ones and the rare large ones — into a single number that represents the long-run average. Video poker strategy is built entirely around comparing the EV of different possible decisions and choosing whichever one produces the highest number.
How this applies to a hold decision
When you're dealt a 5-card hand in video poker, you choose which cards to hold and which to discard, then draw new cards to replace whatever you didn't hold. For any given hand, there are 32 possible hold combinations — every card can be either held or discarded, and 2 multiplied by itself 5 times (2⁵) gives you 32 distinct ways to approach the hand, ranging from holding nothing to holding all five cards.
Each of those 32 hold decisions leads to a different draw, and each possible draw has its own set of possible outcomes, each with its own probability and payout based on the pay table you're playing. Calculating the EV of a specific hold means considering every card combination the deck could produce on the draw, multiplying each one's probability by what it would pay if it landed, and summing all of those products together. Do that for all 32 possible holds, and the one with the highest total is the mathematically correct play for that hand on that pay table.
A simplified worked example
The full combinatorics behind this are complex enough that computers generate the strategy charts players actually use, but the underlying principle is simple enough to walk through conceptually with a simplified, illustrative example.
Say you're dealt a hand with a low pair (two 6s, for instance) alongside three unrelated cards, and separately, those three unrelated cards happen to form an open-ended straight draw if you ignore the pair. You have, roughly, two options: hold the pair and draw three new cards, or break the pair and draw for the straight.
Holding the low pair guarantees you're already sitting on a made hand — worst case, you draw three blanks and still have a pair, which may or may not pay depending on the game, but you also retain a real shot at improving to three of a kind, a full house, or better. Drawing for the open-ended straight instead means discarding a guaranteed pair for a hand that, most of the time, misses entirely and pays nothing — even though an open-ended straight draw completes reasonably often, "reasonably often" is still well under half the time, and when it misses, you're left with nothing at all.
In most standard pay tables, holding the low pair produces a higher EV than breaking it for the open-ended straight draw, because the guaranteed value plus reasonable upside from the pair outweighs the higher-variance, more-often-nothing outcome of the straight draw. This is a simplified version of exactly the kind of comparison a full strategy chart is built from — weighing a safer, more consistent hold against a riskier draw with a different payout profile, and letting the math decide rather than instinct.
Why "correct" means highest EV, not highest win chance
This is the part of EV that trips players up most often: the highest-EV play is not always the play most likely to win something. Sometimes a strategy chart recommends a hold that wins less often overall, but wins bigger when it does, and that bigger-but-rarer payout is worth more on average than the smaller-but-more-frequent alternative. Other times, the reverse is true — a safer, more frequent small win beats chasing a rare big one. There's no universal rule favoring frequency over size or vice versa; it depends entirely on the specific probabilities and payouts involved, which is exactly why the math has to be worked out rather than guessed at.
This is also why two players can watch the same hand play out differently and both be playing correctly — EV describes the long-run average across thousands of repetitions of a decision, not the single result of any one hand. A correct, highest-EV hold can still lose on any individual deal; that's not a contradiction, it's just how averages work over a small sample.
Why this matters more than most players assume
Every properly built strategy chart, and every strategy calculator, is doing this same EV comparison automatically for every possible hand on a specific pay table — see video poker strategy charts explained for how those charts are structured. Understanding the underlying logic, even without doing the combinatorics yourself, makes the charts feel less like a memorized list of rules and more like the product of a consistent, learnable principle: always play the hold that pays the most on average, not the one that feels safest or most exciting in the moment.
Frequently asked questions
Is EV the same thing as RTP? They're related but not identical — RTP is a game-wide long-run average built from the EV of every correctly played hand across a full pay table, while EV can refer to the value of one specific decision within one specific hand.
Why does correct strategy sometimes recommend a play that wins less often? Because EV weighs both probability and payout size together — a play that wins rarely but pays substantially more when it hits can have a higher EV than a play that wins often but for very little.
Do I need to calculate EV manually while playing? No — strategy charts and calculators have already done this math for standard pay tables; understanding the concept just helps the recommendations make sense rather than feeling arbitrary.
Does a correct, highest-EV hold guarantee a win on that hand? No — EV describes an average across many repetitions, not a guarantee for any single hand. A correctly played hand can still lose.
