Video Poker Bankroll
"This game has a player edge" gets repeated a lot around full-pay Deuces Wild, 10/7 Double Bonus, and full-pay Joker Poker. It's true. It also badly undersells how much bankroll you need before that edge actually protects you. Here are the exact numbers, computed from each game's real return and variance, not a rule of thumb.
A genuine 0.76% player edge, and a $500 bankroll still has a worse-than-not chance of going to zero before the long run pays off. The edge is real. It is also thin, and video poker's variance dwarfs it at ordinary bankroll sizes.
"Risk of ruin" means different things depending on whether the game favors you:
Computed using the long-run diffusion approximation for a random walk with drift — the same formula behind this site's bankroll calculator — applied to each game's exact edge and variance.
| Game | Edge | $250 | $500 | $1,000 | $2,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full-Pay Deuces Wild | +0.762% | 88.9% | 79.0% | 62.4% | 38.9% |
| Full-Pay Joker Poker | +0.646% | 90.6% | 82.1% | 67.4% | 45.5% |
| 10/7 Double Bonus | +0.173% | 97.6% | 95.2% | 90.7% | 82.3% |
Quarter play, $1.25 max bet per hand. The same bankroll in bet-unit terms applies at any denomination — $2,000 on quarters carries the same risk as $8,000 on dollars, since both are 1,600 max bets.
10/7 Double Bonus stands out for the wrong reason here: its edge (+0.173%) is much thinner than Deuces Wild's or Joker Poker's, so its risk of ruin stays punishing even at bankrolls where the wild-card games have already dropped to a coin flip. A higher return doesn't always mean the "safer" positive-EV game — the size of the edge relative to the variance is what actually drives how much bankroll you need.
Turning the same formula around: how many max-bets does it take to reach a specific risk-of-ruin target?
| Game | 5% risk | 1% risk | 0.1% risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-Pay Deuces Wild | 5,079 bets | 7,808 bets | 11,712 bets |
| Full-Pay Joker Poker | 6,081 bets | 9,349 bets | 14,023 bets |
| 10/7 Double Bonus | 24,539 bets | 37,722 bets | 56,584 bets |
On quarters ($1.25 max bet), a 1% risk of ruin on full-pay Deuces Wild takes roughly $9,760. On 10/7 Double Bonus, the same 1% target takes roughly $47,150 — nearly five times as much, because that edge is so much thinner. This is the concrete version of "the edge is real but small": it's real enough to compute, and small enough that exploiting it safely takes a genuinely large bankroll, not just a willingness to sit at the machine.
For 9/6 Jacks or Better (99.54% return), "you will eventually go broke" is technically true and practically irrelevant, since almost nobody plays hundreds of thousands of hands at one game. What matters is a realistic session. Here's the exact bust probability by bankroll and hands played, at quarters:
| Bankroll | 500 hands (~1 hr) | 2,000 hands (~4 hrs) | 4,000 hands (~8 hrs) |
|---|---|---|---|
| $100 | 42.6% | 69.8% | 78.9% |
| $200 | 10.9% | 43.4% | 58.8% |
| $300 | 1.6% | 23.7% | 41.2% |
| $500 | 0.0% | 4.7% | 16.7% |
The pattern that matters for planning a session: a $100 bankroll (80 max-bets) is genuinely thin, with real bust risk even in a single hour. A $300-500 bankroll (240-400 max-bets) is comfortable for a multi-hour session on 9/6 Jacks or Better specifically. Run your own bet size and session length in the bankroll calculator rather than assuming these numbers carry over to a different game or bet size — they don't; a higher-variance game like Triple Double Bonus needs meaningfully more bankroll for the same session safety.
Every figure above uses each game's exact return and variance, already validated against published figures on this site (see the full comparison), fed into standard diffusion approximations for a random walk with drift: the classic infinite-horizon formula exp(−2 × edge × bankroll / variance) for positive-edge games, and the finite-horizon reflection-principle formula for a fixed number of hands otherwise. These are well-established approximations from random-walk theory, the same ones underlying this site's bankroll calculator, not a new or unusual method. See the methodology page for how the underlying return and variance figures themselves are computed.
Run your own numbers, any game, any bet size, in the bankroll calculator. See how each game's variance compares in the full game comparison, or learn the exact strategy for a lower-variance game in the strategy hub.
Run your own bankroll numbers →