Video Poker Pay Tables Explained
What this guide covers
Every video poker machine displays a pay table on screen before you bet a single coin, and every pay table follows the same basic grid structure regardless of the specific game. This guide is about reading that grid correctly — what the rows and columns mean, why the numbers jump the way they do, and how to identify what variant you're actually playing just by looking at the chart. For what those numbers mean for your long-run return, see video poker odds and RTP explained; for why small differences in the grid matter so much, see why pay tables matter in video poker.
The basic grid structure
A pay table is a grid with hand types listed down the left side — Royal Flush, Straight Flush, Four of a Kind, Full House, Flush, Straight, Three of a Kind, Two Pair, and so on down to the game's qualifying hand — and columns across the top representing how many coins you bet, typically 1 through 5. Each cell in the grid shows the payout multiplier for that hand at that coin level. Find your hand's row, find your coin-bet column, and the number at the intersection is how many coins you win.
Why the payouts scale the way they do
For every hand except the Royal Flush, payouts scale in a straightforward, linear way as you increase your coin bet from 1 to 4. If a Full House pays 9 coins at 1-coin bet, it pays 18 at 2 coins, 27 at 3 coins, and 36 at 4 coins — the multiplier stays constant, only the coin count changes. This makes the grid easy to scan: once you know the 1-coin payout for a hand, you can predict the rest of that row just by multiplying.
The Royal Flush breaks this pattern entirely. At 1 through 4 coins, it typically pays 250-for-1 per coin — following the same linear logic as every other hand. But at 5 coins, the maximum bet, it jumps to roughly 800-for-1 instead of the 1,000 you'd expect from a linear scale. That disproportionate jump is deliberate, and it's the reason max-coin betting matters so much in this game — a huge share of a full-pay machine's overall return is baked into that one oversized number, and you only get access to it by betting the full 5 coins. For more on why that jump exists and what it means for a session, see video poker Royal Flush explained.
Identifying the game variant from the qualifying hand
The qualifying hand — the lowest hand that pays anything at all — sits at the bottom of the pay table, and it's the fastest way to identify what variant you're looking at before you've committed a single bet.
- If the lowest paying hand is "Jacks or Better" (a pair of Jacks, Queens, Kings, or Aces), you're looking at a Jacks or Better-family game.
- If the lowest paying hand is "Three of a Kind" with no pair tier at all, and deuces (2s) are called out as wild somewhere on the screen, you're looking at a Deuces Wild-style game, where the wild-card mechanic reshapes the entire pay structure.
- Bonus-style games (Bonus Poker, Double Bonus, Double Double Bonus) keep the Jacks or Better qualifying hand but restructure the Four of a Kind rows into multiple tiers based on card rank, which is another quick visual tell.
Recognizing the qualifying hand and general shape of the grid takes a few seconds and immediately tells you which strategy chart and which baseline RTP expectations apply.
The two rows that tell you almost everything: Full House and Flush
For Jacks-or-Better-family games specifically, you don't need to study the entire grid to classify a pay table — two rows do almost all the work. Look at the Full House and Flush payouts at 1-coin bet. A pay table showing 9 coins for Full House and 6 coins for Flush is described as "9/6" — the industry shorthand for full-pay Jacks or Better, currently the strongest commonly available version at roughly 99.54% RTP with perfect play. Drop the Full House payout to 8 and the Flush to 5, and you have "8/5," a noticeably weaker table around 97.3%. Drop further to 6 and 5, and "6/5" lands closer to 95%.
This shorthand works because, in Jacks or Better's math, the Full House and Flush tiers are common enough to move the overall RTP meaningfully, but rare enough that casinos can quietly trim them without changing how the game looks or feels moment to moment. Every other row on a 9/6, 8/5, or 6/5 table is typically identical — it's specifically these two numbers that differ.
A practical step-by-step approach
Before sitting down at any machine, run through this sequence:
- Find the qualifying hand at the bottom of the grid to confirm the variant.
- If it's a Jacks-or-Better-style game, check the Full House and Flush numbers at 1-coin bet.
- Compare those two numbers against the known full-pay benchmark for that variant.
- Check the Royal Flush payout at 5 coins specifically — confirm it's the expected 4,000 coins (800-for-1) rather than something lower.
- Only then start betting, ideally at max coin.
This takes less time than it does to read, and it's the single most reliable habit for avoiding a quietly weaker pay table that looks identical to a stronger one at a glance. For the specific terminology used across these grids — qualifying hands, coin denominations, paytable shorthand — see video poker terms every player should know.
Frequently asked questions
Do all video poker games use the same grid layout? Yes — hand types as rows, coin bet as columns, payout multipliers in each cell — though the specific hands listed and their order shift based on the variant.
Why does the Royal Flush payout jump so much more than other hands at 5 coins? It's a deliberate bonus built into the pay table specifically to reward max-coin betting, since the Royal Flush carries a disproportionate share of the game's total theoretical return.
Can I tell a pay table's RTP just from the Full House and Flush numbers? For Jacks-or-Better-family games, yes, with reasonable confidence — those two numbers alone commonly classify the table as 9/6, 8/5, 6/5, or another known tier.
What if I don't recognize the qualifying hand shown on a machine? Treat it as a signal to check the game's rules screen or a strategy guide before betting, since an unfamiliar qualifying hand usually means an unfamiliar variant with its own strategy requirements.
