Slot Intelligence Series / Vol. X
Video Poker
A technical and mathematical review of the video poker family — draw poker from the 1970 Poker-Matic to IGT's Game King and PeakBarTop, every pay schedule in circulation solved exactly, the best holds and key hands for each flagship game, Ultimate X and Multi-Strike priced as the state machines they are, the pay tables region by region from Station Casinos to Montana's bars, and the royal flush that is never due.
Executive summary
Video poker is IGT's category, and its history is dated by the company's own filings. The first machine on the record is Dale Electronics' Poker-Matic of 1970; William "Si" Redd's SIRCOMA introduced Draw Poker in 1979 and became International Game Technology, which claims first use of Player's Edge in August 1986, Bonus Poker in 1990, Double Bonus Poker in 1993, Double Double Bonus Poker in 1995 and Game King, the multi-game touch screen, in August 1996. Ernie Moody's Triple Play Draw Poker, in commerce from June 1998, turned one deal into several hands, each drawn from its own deck, and his next-round multipliers, filed in December 2006, became Ultimate X; IGT bought his video poker patents in 2014. A columnist estimated in 2016 that IGT "makes roughly 95 percent of the video poker games you see in casinos".
The pay table is the whole of the game's mathematics, and this volume solves every one exactly. The machine must deal like a deck — Nevada requires a game "representative of live gambling games" to give each card "the mathematical probability of that symbol or element occurring in the live gambling game" — so a schedule's return at perfect play is a fixed number that can be counted rather than estimated. This volume's solver counts every one of the 2,598,960 deals and its 32 holds in whole numbers, 19,933,230,517,200 weighted outcomes for a 52-card game; it solved 239 schedules in 30 families, reproduced 228 published returns to the last printed digit and every combination count of the Wizard of Odds' 9/6 Jacks or Better table, and agreed with a brute-force recount on all 113,664 draw counts tested. 9/6 Jacks or Better returns 99.5439% with a royal once in 40,391 hands; full-pay Deuces Wild returns 100.7620%; 10/7 Double Bonus, 100.1725%.
The best hold is a ranked list, and the families part company on a handful of hands. Section 5.6 gives a strategy list for each flagship schedule, built from the solver's exact values, and Section 5.7 the key hands: two pair is held in Jacks or Better, but aces up is broken to the aces in Double Double Bonus; four aces with a king are broken to draw for a 2, 3 or 4 kicker; full-pay Deuces Wild throws away all five cards on 19.1% of deals. The price of the wrong list is exact: a Jacks or Better strategy gives back 0.37 points on Double Double Bonus and 1.86 on Triple Double Bonus (Table 5.23), and a published figure that disagrees with the exact one is entered in a register of bad figures.
The formats sell more bets on the same deal, and the ones that carry state can be solved. Multi-hand play draws every line from its own deck, so a schedule returns the same at every hand count and only the swing changes. Ultimate X doubles the bet and carries multipliers to the next hand; solved as a Markov decision process on the sum of the multipliers, following Koehler's theorem, it reproduces 90 of the 90 IGT figures solved to six decimals, and it shows the feature earning its keep only when the holds change with the multipliers — played by the base game's strategy it gives back from six-tenths of its gain to more than all of it. Multi-Strike, four levels of doubled pays unlocked by Free Ride cards, reproduces every published return whose Free Ride chances are known, and Super Times Pay multiplies the base return by exactly 1.0027778.27,28 The good schedules survive in the Las Vegas locals casinos and almost nowhere else. Station Casinos lists 10/7 Double Bonus at 100.17% at six casinos and the Plaza one full-pay Joker Poker machine at 100.65%; the Strip "does not have any 100% video poker pay tables," full-pay Deuces Wild left its last known floor in 2023, and taverns run "in the 95 to 97 percent range." Outside Nevada the law sets the terms: Mississippi and Colorado cap the return at 100%, South Dakota and Oregon at 96% and West Virginia at 95%, which on its face rules out every familiar schedule; Montana's bars allow $2 a game and $800 a prize, limits a 2025 bill failed to raise; and Louisiana's law requires every device to "offer the game of draw poker".
The largest payouts are multi-hand wins, and each one decomposes exactly. The largest on the record, $1.2 million at Resorts World Las Vegas on December 14, 2025, was three royals on a $5 Double Super Times Pay machine played three hands for $105 under a 20× multiplier — 3 × 4,000 coins × $5 × 20; the Cosmopolitan's $1,000,000 in 2021 was a dealt four aces with a kicker on $25 Ten Play. Every schedule has a progressive meter at which it returns 100%, found here by re-solving the strategy royal by royal — 4,880 coins for 9/6 Jacks or Better — and a Sam's Town bank that resets at $1,500 starts above its break-even, which is exactly why it is listed at 100.14%.30 The royal flush is never due, and the only state on a video poker machine is the kind the player can see. Every deal is a fresh shuffle — South Dakota writes it into rule as a deck "shuffled randomly and frozen" before each deal — so the chance of a royal on the next hand does not depend on how long the machine has gone without one. At 9/6 Jacks or Better about one player in seven — 13.5% — goes twice the royal cycle, 80,781 hands, without a royal, and his next hand is no likelier to bring one than his first (Appendix C.4). The real state is on the screen and priced exactly: Ultimate X multipliers left on a machine are worth their walk-up value, Multi-Strike levels are solved backward, and a progressive meter is a richer royal, not a nearer one.
99.5439% 100.7620% 228 of 238 $1.2 million 9 / 6 J A C K S O R B E T T E R , E X A C T F U L L - PAY D E U C E S W I L D , E X A C T P U B L I S H E D R E T U R N S R E P R O D U C E D E X A C T LY L A R G E S T PAYO U T , R E S O RT S W O R L D 2 0 2 5
What the volume covers
Section 1 is the orientation: one deal and thirty-two holds, the pay-table families and the formats, and where each is documented. In this volume video poker is five-card draw from a fair deck; the family is every schedule and format built on it; a schedule, or pay table, is one set of pays; a format is the way a deal is played; and return means return at perfect play and maximum coins unless a qualifier says otherwise. Sections 2 and 3 cover the history, the company, the trademarks, patents and cabinets. Section 4 is the mechanical core — the deal and the draw, the holds, the royal bonus and every format from multihand to Double Up. Section 5 is the mathematics: how every return was computed and checked, the flagship return tables, volatility, the value of a pay step, the strategy lists, the key hands and a register of the bad figures. Section 6 is the census of every schedule and format. Sections 7 through 10 cover progressives and payouts, bets and denominations, the market and the regional pay tables, and the channels and their rules. Appendix A grades the sources, Appendix B shows every calculation, and Appendix C answers the persistent-state question.
Independent research by Lost Cabin Consulting LLC, not published, endorsed or reviewed by any game maker; game names belong to their owners. Gambling carries real risk of loss, and nothing here promises a win. Play only where it is legal and you are of age. If gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER. See the disclaimer.
Practice the table games free in the casino simulators, or see every volume.