Video Poker Strategy
Aces and Eights takes its name from the "Dead Man's Hand" (aces and eights), and pays a real bonus for quad aces or eights (80) and a smaller one for quad sevens (50, matching a straight flush). To fund that bonus, full house drops to 8 coins and flush to 5, both a notch below 9/6 Jacks or Better's 9 and 6 — the same trade-off every bonus-quad game makes, just spread across three quad tiers instead of one. Perfect play returns 99.7818%, computed exactly by our engine and matching the accepted published figure to four decimal places.
| Hand | Pays (per coin) |
|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 800 |
| Straight Flush | 50 |
| Four Aces or 8s | 80 |
| Four 7s | 50 |
| Four of a Kind (other ranks) | 25 |
| Full House | 8 |
| Flush | 5 |
| Straight | 4 |
| Three of a Kind | 3 |
| Two Pair | 2 |
| Jacks or Better | 1 |
At 99.78%, this is the highest-returning non-wild-card game on this site — higher than 9/6 Jacks or Better and every Bonus/Double Bonus variant here. The trade-off that pays for the aces/eights/sevens bonus is a full house cut to 8 and a flush cut to 5 (vs 9 and 6 in 9/6 Jacks or Better) — our engine confirms this shows up as a measurably lower full-house EV in the chart below, the honest cost of the bonus quads.
Hold the highest-ranked pattern your hand matches. Every EV below is engine-exact for the specific example hand shown; the vs 9/6 JoB column shows whether this pattern's rank moved compared to the Jacks or Better baseline, which tells you exactly where this pay table's incentives genuinely diverge. A few hands near a boundary can shift slightly with the exact ranks involved, so check the hand analyzer for anything unusual.
| # | Hold this pattern | Example | EV/coin | vs 9/6 JoB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Four of a kind (pat) | 2c 7c 7d 7h 7s | 50.0000 | up from #2 |
| 2 | Straight flush (pat) | 6c 7c 8c 9c 10c | 50.0000 | down from #1 |
| 3 | Four to a royal flush | 10c Jc Qc Kc 2d | 19.5319 | unchanged (#3) |
| 4 | Full house (pat) | 4c 9c 4d 9d 9h | 8.0000 | unchanged (#4) |
| 5 | Three of a kind | 3c 8c 8d Kd 8h | 6.5819 | up from #6 |
| 6 | Flush (pat) | 2h 6h 9h Jh Kh | 5.0000 | down from #5 |
| 7 | Straight (pat) | 5c 8c 6d 9d 7h | 4.0000 | unchanged (#7) |
| 8 | Four to a straight flush | 6c 7c 8c 9c 2d | 3.3830 | unchanged (#8) |
| 9 | Two pair | 4c Jc 9d Jd 4h | 2.5106 | unchanged (#9) |
| 10 | High pair (jacks or better) | 7c Jc 9d Jd 4h | 1.5264 | unchanged (#10) |
| 11 | Three to a royal flush | 10c Jc Qc 7d 4h | 1.4903 | unchanged (#11) |
| 12 | Four to a flush | 4c 2h 6h 9h Jh | 1.0213 | unchanged (#12) |
| 13 | Low pair | 6c Kc 3d 6d 9h | 0.8135 | unchanged (#13) |
| 14 | Four to an open-ended straight | 5c 8c 2d 6d 7h | 0.6809 | unchanged (#14) |
| 15 | Two suited high cards | Qc Kc 7d 4h 3s | 0.5951 | up from #16 |
| 16 | Three to a straight flush, no gap | 6c 7c 8c Kd 2h | 0.5939 | down from #15 |
| 17 | Four to an inside straight, 3 high cards | 3c Kc Qd Jh 9s | 0.5319 | unchanged (#17) |
| 18 | Suited ten/high card (e.g. JT suited) | 10c Jc 7d 4h 3s | 0.5003 | unchanged (#18) |
| 19 | Two unsuited high cards | Kc 7d Qd 4h 3s | 0.4929 | unchanged (#19) |
| 20 | One lone high card | 3c Kc 2d 6d 9h | 0.4683 | unchanged (#20) |
| 21 | Garbage (discard all five) | 2c 5d 6d 9h 3s | 0.3610 | unchanged (#21) |
| 22 | Four to an inside straight, fewer than 3 high cards | 5c 9c 2d 8d 7h | 0.3582 | unchanged (#22) |
The pay table was checked against the accepted published return using the same exact inclusion-exclusion engine behind the return calculator, matching to four decimal places. Every row in the chart above is evaluated by the same engine behind every strategy page and the hand analyzer: for each of the 32 possible holds, it enumerates every real draw from the remaining cards and computes the exact expected value, then reports the best. See the methodology page for the full explanation.
The trainer deals real hands for this exact pay table and grades every hold against this engine.
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