Video poker odds: Jacks or Better 9/6 and which cards to hold
How 9/6 Jacks or Better works: the pay table, how often each hand lands after the draw, the holds that matter and what a 0.46% edge means.
Fact-checked 21 October 2026 · 6 sourcesVideo poker is five-card draw played against a pay table instead of other players: you're dealt five cards, keep any of them and draw once to replace the rest. In 9/6 Jacks or Better, the best hold on every hand returns 99.54% of what you bet, so the house still keeps 0.46% on average, and every weaker hold costs more.
How a hand works
The game shuffles a 52-card deck and deals five cards. You can hold anything from none to all five, which makes 2⁵ = 32 possible holds, and the discards are replaced from the 47 cards left in the same deck. The final hand is paid from the pay table.
Jacks or Better names the smallest paying hand, a pair of jacks, queens, kings or aces; those four ranks are the high cards. A low pair, tens or below, pays nothing by itself but can still improve on the draw. Pays include the stake, so a pair of jacks only gives your bet back. On cs2.casino, Video Poker is Jacks or Better 9/6, with a full 52-card shuffle for every hand.
The pay table and where the return comes from
The chances below are for the final hand with the best hold every time, from the Wizard of Odds' exact count of every deal and draw. The share is chance × pay, the part of each coin bet that comes back through that hand (rounded, so the column adds to 99.55% rather than 99.54%).
| Final hand | Pays | Chance | Share of return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 800 | 0.0025% | 1.98% |
| Straight flush | 50 | 0.011% | 0.55% |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 0.24% | 5.91% |
| Full house | 9 | 1.15% | 10.36% |
| Flush | 6 | 1.10% | 6.61% |
| Straight | 4 | 1.12% | 4.49% |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 7.44% | 22.33% |
| Two pair | 2 | 12.93% | 25.86% |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 21.46% | 21.46% |
| Nothing | 0 | 54.54% | 0 |
More than half of all hands end with nothing, and another 21.5% only return the stake. The small hands do most of the work: two pair, three of a kind and a high pair supply 69.6 of the 99.54 points.
The royal flush is the outlier. It pays 800 for 1 and comes about once in 40,391 hands, worth 1.98% of the return. Being dealt one is far rarer, 1 deal in 649,740, so the draw makes a royal about 16 times as likely.
Why the 9 and the 6 matter
The 9/6 in the name is the pay for a full house and a flush; this version is called full pay. Casinos often cut one or both and leave the rest of the table alone. With the best play for each table, the Wizard of Odds gives these returns:
| Pay table | Return | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| 9/6 | 99.54% | 0.46% |
| 9/5 | 98.45% | 1.55% |
| 8/6 | 98.39% | 1.61% |
| 8/5 | 97.30% | 2.70% |
| 7/5 | 96.15% | 3.85% |
| 6/5 | 95.00% | 5.00% |
A full house comes 1.15% of the time, so paying 8 instead of 9 costs 1.15% of every coin bet, matching the drop from 99.54% to 98.39%. The flush cut costs 1.09 points, a little less than the flush's 1.10% frequency, because the best strategy shifts to compensate. An 8/5 table keeps almost six times as much as 9/6 from the same cards, and 6/5 about 11 times.
Which cards to hold
Each of the 32 holds has an average return: the mean pay, in bets, over every card the draw could bring. The best play is the hold with the highest average, and the Wizard of Odds' optimal strategy for 9/6 ranks every hold that's ever correct.
The averages below are exact, worked out for this article from every possible draw. Cards are written rank first, then suit: s, h, d and c for spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs, so Kd is the king of diamonds.
| Dealt | Tempting hold | Average | Best hold | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Ah Kh Qh Jh 10s | the straight | 4.00 | Ah Kh Qh Jh | 18.47 |
Ks Kd 9s 6s 2s | four spades | 1.19 | the kings | 1.54 |
Qs Qd Ks Js 4h | Ks Qs Js | 1.49 | the queens | 1.54 |
10s 10d Qs As 4h | the tens | 0.82 | 10s Qs As | 1.33 |
7s 7d 9s 5s 2s | the sevens | 0.82 | four spades | 1.15 |
5c 6d 7s 7h 8c | 5-6-7-8 | 0.68 | the sevens | 0.82 |
Jc Jd As 8h 3c | jacks and the ace | 1.42 | the jacks | 1.54 |
In the first row, holding the four hearts, called four to a royal, leaves 47 cards: the 10h makes a royal, 8 other hearts a flush, the 2 remaining tens a straight and 12 cards a high pair, an average of (800 + 8 × 6 + 2 × 4 + 12) / 47 = 18.47 bets against the straight's 4.
The table reflects a few rules from the full ranking:
- Keep a made straight, flush or better, except that four to a royal flush beats a straight or a flush.
- A high pair beats every draw except four to a royal or to a straight flush; three to a royal comes close but loses.
- Four to a flush and three to a royal both beat a low pair.
- A low pair beats four to an open-ended straight, like 5-6-7-8, and any other high cards, except 10-J-Q-K with a pair of tens, where the draw averages 0.87 to the pair's 0.82.
- Never keep a kicker, an extra high card, with a pair.
- Two suited high cards beat two unsuited ones, and three to a straight flush can beat both. Even one high card is worth keeping; with nothing, draw five new cards, which averages about 0.36.
You don't need the full ranking to get close: the Wizard of Odds' 16-line simple strategy returns 99.46%, 0.08% short of perfect play. A single mistake costs far more than that average: keeping the ace with the jacks gives up 0.12 of a bet each time, about 26 times the edge on an average hand. Blackjack basic strategy makes the same case for blackjack.
Swings, royals and the long run
A hand has a standard deviation of 4.42 bets, most of it from the royal, so the edge is small next to the swings. Over 1,000 one-coin hands the expected loss is 4.6 coins and the typical spread about 140 coins either way, and an exact calculation gives a 35% chance of finishing ahead.
The chance of at least one royal is only 2.4% in 1,000 hands and 22% in 10,000; even odds take about 28,000 hands. The other hands return about 97.6%, so a session without a royal loses about 2.4% of what you bet on average. A long wait doesn't make one due: each hand is a fresh shuffle, as the gambler's fallacy explains.
Over time the house wins. Every game on cs2.casino shows its house edge and bet limits, and for 9/6 the 0.46% is a floor that every weaker hold adds to. House edge and RTP shows how the 99.54% is worked out from every deal and how an edge adds up over a session.
Checking a hand
All of this assumes a fair deck. Nevada requires a machine that represents a live game to give each card the chance it would have there, or to disclose the difference, and other US regulators typically require a random virtual deck.
cs2.casino's Video Poker, like its other solo games, uses a seed pair so you can check each deck yourself. The server seed is committed by its SHA-256 hash before you bet, you can change the client seed, and the nonce goes up by one each bet. Rotate the pair and the old server seed is revealed, so every hand dealt with it can be replayed in the provably fair calculator; how to verify a provably fair bet does the same kind of check by hand. A zero bet stakes nothing and moves the nonce on, so you can practise holds at Video Poker.
