Video poker looks like a slot machine and is filed next to the slots at most online casinos. It is a very different game. A slot’s return is hidden inside the software and nothing you do changes it. A video poker game prints its pay table on the screen, uses a standard 52-card deck, and rewards good decisions. Pick the right game and play it well, and you can get a return of 99.5% or more, better than almost anything else in the casino.
The flip side is that two games with the same name can pay very differently, and most players never look. This page shows you how to read a pay table in a few seconds, which games are worth your time, and how to play them for real money at Canadian online casinos.
Quick answer: Look for Jacks or Better that pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush (“9/6”). With correct strategy it returns 99.54%. Always play the maximum number of coins, at a coin value you can afford, because the royal flush bonus only applies at max coins. Avoid 8/5 and lower versions, and expect most casinos to count video poker at 0% to 20% toward bonus wagering.
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About this list. These are our general picks for players outside Ontario and Alberta, ranked by our overall review score. Video poker libraries vary much more than slot libraries. Some casinos carry a dozen titles and others one or two, and the pay tables differ by game. Check the lobby and the pay table before you deposit. If you live in Ontario or Alberta, play at a provincially licensed site instead (see the section on provincial sites further down).
How Video Poker Works
- Choose your coin value and number of coins. Most games take one to five coins per hand.
- Deal. You get five cards from a freshly shuffled 52-card deck (53 with a joker in some games).
- Hold. Pick which cards to keep. You can keep all five, none, or anything in between.
- Draw. The cards you did not hold are replaced from the same deck.
- Get paid. Your final hand is paid according to the pay table on screen. In Jacks or Better, a pair of jacks or higher is the smallest winning hand.
There is no dealer hand and no other players. You are not trying to beat anyone, only to make the best hand you can from the cards dealt. The hand rankings are the same as in regular poker, from a pair up to a royal flush. If you are coming from Texas Hold’em, our explainer on poker hand strength and pocket pairs covers the rankings from the other side of the felt.
Reading a Pay Table: The 10-Second Check
Every video poker game shows what each hand pays. In Jacks or Better, almost all lines are the same from one version to the next. The two that change are the full house and the flush, and players name games by those two numbers. “9/6” means a full house pays 9 and a flush pays 6 for each coin bet.
| Hand | 9/6 Jacks or Better, per coin | At 5 coins |
|---|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250 (800 at max coins) | 4,000 |
| Straight flush | 50 | 250 |
| Four of a kind | 25 | 125 |
| Full house | 9 | 45 |
| Flush | 6 | 30 |
| Straight | 4 | 20 |
| Three of a kind | 3 | 15 |
| Two pair | 2 | 10 |
| Jacks or better | 1 | 5 |
Now see what happens when the casino trims those two lines:
| Jacks or Better version (full house / flush) | Return with perfect strategy | Average cost per C$100 bet |
|---|---|---|
| 9/6 (full pay) | 99.54% | C$0.46 |
| 9/5 | 98.45% | C$1.55 |
| 8/6 | 98.39% | C$1.61 |
| 8/5 | 97.30% | C$2.70 |
| 7/5 | 96.15% | C$3.85 |
| 6/5 | 95.00% | C$5.00 |
The same game, the same graphics and the same name, but a 6/5 table costs you more than ten times as much as a 9/6 table. This is the single most useful thing to know about video poker, and it takes ten seconds to check.
Always Play Maximum Coins
Look at the royal flush line again. At one to four coins it pays 250 per coin. At five coins it jumps to 4,000, or 800 per coin. That bonus is worth roughly 1.3% to 1.5% of your return, so playing fewer than five coins turns a 99.5% game into one around 98%. If five coins at your preferred value is too much, drop the coin value instead. Five coins at C$0.10 is a C$0.50 hand with the full pay table working for you.
Video Poker Games Compared
The figures below are for the best pay table you are likely to find for each game, played with the correct strategy for that game. Lower pay tables are common, so treat these as the ceiling, not the norm.
| Game | Pay table to look for | Return | Volatility | What is different |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jacks or Better | 9/6 | 99.54% | Low | The standard game and the easiest to learn |
| Tens or Better | 6/5 | 99.14% | Low | A pair of tens pays, so the full house and flush pay less |
| Bonus Poker | 8/5 | 99.17% | Low to medium | Bigger payouts for four aces and four 2s, 3s or 4s |
| Bonus Poker Deluxe | 9/6 | 99.64% | Medium | Every four of a kind pays 80; two pair pays only 1 |
| Aces and Eights | 8/5 | 99.78% | Medium | Bonus payouts for four aces and four eights |
| Double Bonus | 10/7 | 100.17% | High | Large four-of-a-kind bonuses; two pair pays only 1 |
| Double Double Bonus | 9/6 | 98.98% | High | Even bigger bonuses for four aces with a kicker |
| Deuces Wild | Full pay (four of a kind pays 5) | 100.76% | High | All 2s are wild; the smallest win is three of a kind |
A return above 100% means a perfect player would come out ahead over the very long run. Before that sounds too good, note two things. Full-pay Deuces Wild and 10/7 Double Bonus are rare online, and the versions most casinos run pay 4 for four of a kind in Deuces Wild or trim the Double Bonus lines, which puts them well below 100%. And those returns assume flawless strategy for that specific game, which is harder to learn than Jacks or Better.
Joker Poker, which adds a joker as a wild card, and the many newer bonus variants have pay tables that vary too much to summarise. The rule is the same for all of them: compare the pay table on screen with a known full-pay table before you play.
Basic Strategy for Jacks or Better
Video poker is one of the few casino games where your decisions change the return. The good news is that a simplified strategy gets you within about a tenth of a percent of perfect play. Start at the top of this list and hold the first hand that matches what you were dealt:
- Royal flush, straight flush or four of a kind.
- Four cards to a royal flush, even if that means breaking up a flush, a straight or a high pair.
- Full house, flush, straight or three of a kind.
- Four cards to a straight flush.
- Two pair.
- A high pair (jacks, queens, kings or aces).
- Three cards to a royal flush.
- Four cards to a flush.
- A low pair (tens or below).
- Four cards to an open-ended straight.
- Two suited high cards.
- Three cards to a straight flush.
- Two unsuited high cards (if you have three, keep the two lowest).
- A suited ten with a jack, queen or king.
- One high card.
- If nothing above applies, discard all five.
The mistakes that cost players most are easy to fix. Never hold a “kicker” (an extra high card) next to a pair. Keep a low pair rather than drawing to an open-ended straight. Do not break a high pair to chase a flush. And when you have four to a royal, break whatever you have to go for it, except a straight flush.
Keep a strategy chart open beside the game. Online, nobody minds, and the demo version is the perfect place to practise until the decisions are automatic. Playing by feel commonly costs 2% or more, which turns a 99.5% game into an ordinary one. Our breakdown of casino strategies that genuinely improve your results explains why this kind of skill matters and betting systems do not.
What to Expect From a Real Money Session
Video poker returns are long-run figures, and the royal flush does a lot of the work. With 9/6 Jacks or Better strategy, a royal comes about once every 40,000 hands and accounts for roughly 2% of the game’s total return. Between royals, you are effectively playing a game that returns around 97.5%. So most sessions end slightly down, a few end well up, and the 99.54% figure only shows up across a very large number of hands.
Wins are frequent, though. In Jacks or Better about 45% of hands pay something, although many of those payouts only return your stake. High-volatility games like Double Double Bonus and Deuces Wild win less often and lean more on big hands, so they need a larger bankroll for the same session length. Our explainer on how return to player works shows how these percentages turn into real sessions.
Multi-Hand Video Poker
Games such as Triple Play, Five Play and Ten Play deal the same starting hand into several hands, then draw separately for each. The return per hand is unchanged, but your bet per round is multiplied. Five hands of five coins at C$0.25 is C$6.25 a deal, so size your stake to the total.
The Double-Up Feature
Many games offer to double a win on a simple card guess. In the usual format the gamble is a fair 50/50 with no house edge, so it does not change your return, but it makes your results swing harder. Use it only if you want more volatility, and check the help screen, because not every version is fair.
Where to Play Video Poker Online
Video poker is one category where the casino you choose really matters, because selections range from deep to almost nothing. From our reviews:
- Clear information. Our Spin Casino review found video poker well represented in RNG form, with per-title RTP figures on the info screen. That makes the pay table check easy.
- Specific titles worth seeking out. Wheelz carries Aces and Eights, one of the highest-paying games on the chart above, and SlotsMagic lists Deuces Wild among more than 100 RNG tables. Check the pay table, as always.
- Thin selections. TonyBet has no dedicated video poker category, and reviewers report about nine titles, mostly IGT games such as Game King and Triple Play Draw Poker, found through the lobby search. Our Zet Casino review notes no dedicated video poker section either.
Ignore a casino’s headline game count. A lobby of 5,000 games can contain only a couple of video poker titles, and the overall payout rate of a casino tells you little about its pay tables. Our list of highest paying online casinos in Canada covers the casino-wide figures, but for video poker, the pay table on the game itself is what counts.
Video Poker and Casino Bonuses
Casinos are well aware that video poker can return more than 99%, so most bonus terms keep it at arm’s length. Among the casinos we have reviewed, Casimba, Spinz, Caxino and SpinsBro all count video poker at 0% toward wagering, even where Spinz and Caxino count other table games at 50%. Where it does count, 10% to 20% is typical. On a C$100 bonus with 35x wagering, a 10% weighting means C$35,000 of video poker play.
So the welcome bonus is rarely the reason to choose a casino for video poker. Play with cash, or look for rewards that do not care which game you play, such as cashback with low wagering. If you do take a match offer, our explainer on casino welcome bonus terms shows how to check weighting before you commit.
Video Poker at Ontario and Alberta Licensed Sites
In Ontario, play at operators registered with the AGCO, listed in our overview of legal Ontario online casinos. 888 Casino runs several video poker formats including Jacks or Better and Deuces Wild, and our BetMGM casino review found video poker alongside its table games. Not every Ontario brand has it: our Royal Panda review found no video poker on the Ontario site.
Alberta’s regulated market opened on July 13, 2026, and our page on regulated Alberta casino sites follows which brands have launched. In the other provinces, players choose between the provincial lottery site and offshore casinos licensed elsewhere.
Video Poker vs Slots and Table Games
The comparison with slots is the one that matters, because the games sit side by side. A typical online slot returns 94% to 97%, and you cannot do anything to change that. A 9/6 Jacks or Better game played well returns 99.54%. Over C$1,000 of bets, that is about C$4.60 lost on average against C$30 to C$60 on the slot. Our explainer on getting the most from slot play covers the reels side of that comparison.
Against table games, video poker is in the top group. Blackjack with good rules and basic strategy returns about 99.5%, as covered in our page on online blackjack for real money. Baccarat’s Banker bet returns 98.94% with no decisions at all, and the line bets with odds in real money craps get close to 99.6%. European online roulette trails at 97.30%. Our ranking of which casino games are easiest to win puts them all in one table.