Trust & accuracy
Every number on this site is computed, not copied. Here is exactly how, and how we know it is right.
Last reviewed 2026-07-06. Maintained by the site's engine author, following the editorial standards below.
For any dealt hand there are 32 ways to choose which cards to hold. For each of those 32 holds, our engine enumerates every possible draw from the remaining cards, scores the resulting five-card hand against the game's pay table, and averages the result. That average is the exact expected value of the hold. The best hold is simply the one with the highest expected value. No simulation, no sampling, no approximation.
The core of the engine is the hand evaluator that classifies any five cards. We validated it by running it over all 2,598,960 distinct five-card poker hands and confirming the category counts match the known mathematical values exactly, down to the last hand. We further checked expected values against independently known results, such as four to a royal flush being worth 19.6809 credits per coin in Jacks or Better.
Every per-hand value, strategy ranking, and decision comparison on this site is produced by the engine. As of this release, so are the aggregate return percentages. We built an exact counting engine that scores every possible outcome of all 2,598,960 dealt hands under all 32 hold decisions, always taking the optimal hold, and derives the precise return and variance of a pay table. It reproduces the accepted figures exactly: 99.5439% for 9/6 Jacks or Better, 100.7620% for full-pay Deuces Wild, 100.1725% for 10/7 Double Bonus, and so on for every table we publish. Nothing on this site is a simulation and no number is copied from someone else. You can run the same computation yourself in the return calculator.
Brute force would require roughly 10 trillion evaluations, so the engine uses exact combinatorics instead. It precomputes, for every subset of up to five cards, the total payout of all five-card hands containing that subset. The expected value of any hold then falls out of an inclusion-exclusion over the discarded cards, and suit symmetry reduces the 2,598,960 deals to 134,459 weighted classes. The result is mathematically identical to full enumeration and runs in seconds in your browser.
This site has one author and one engine, and every page is held to the same rule: a number is only published once it has been produced by the engine and checked against an independently known figure where one exists. Nothing here is copied from another strategy site, a forum post, or a book, and nothing is estimated by simulation.
For who is behind this and why, see the about page. For what this site will not tell you to do, see responsible gambling.
The hand analyzer exposes the engine directly: enter any five cards and see the exact expected value of all 32 holds. That is the same computation behind every strategy page and every graded hand in the trainer.
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