Video Poker Strategy
All American is the most distinctive pay table on this site: full house, flush, and straight all pay exactly the same, 8 coins, and a straight flush pays a massive 200 (four times the usual 50). No other game here flattens those three categories together, and the result is a genuinely different hierarchy: four to a straight flush jumps far above where it sits in Jacks or Better, since it is now drawing toward a 200-coin hand instead of a 50-coin one. Perfect play returns 99.5979%, computed exactly by our engine and matching the accepted published figure to four decimal places.
| Hand | Pays (per coin) |
|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 800 |
| Straight Flush | 200 |
| Four of a Kind (any rank) | 35 |
| Full House | 8 |
| Flush | 8 |
| Straight | 8 |
| Three of a Kind | 3 |
| Two Pair | 1 |
| Jacks or Better | 1 |
Because straight, flush, and full house pay identically, there is no reason to prefer a flush draw over a straight draw the way you would in Jacks or Better — the table's design flattens that whole tier of decisions. What it does not flatten is the straight flush: our engine ranks four to a straight flush as the 4th-best pattern overall here (10.72 per coin), well above where it sits in every other game on this site.
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 | Straight flush (pat) | 6c 7c 8c 9c 10c | 200.0000 | unchanged (#1) |
| 2 | Four of a kind (pat) | 2c 7c 7d 7h 7s | 35.0000 | unchanged (#2) |
| 3 | Four to a royal flush | 10c Jc Qc Kc 2d | 23.6809 | unchanged (#3) |
| 4 | Four to a straight flush | 6c 7c 8c 9c 2d | 10.7234 | up from #8 |
| 5 | Full house (pat) | 4c 9c 4d 9d 9h | 8.0000 | down from #4 |
| 6 | Flush (pat) | 2h 6h 9h Jh Kh | 8.0000 | down from #5 |
| 7 | Straight (pat) | 5c 8c 6d 9d 7h | 8.0000 | unchanged (#7) |
| 8 | Three of a kind | 3c 8c 8d Kd 8h | 4.6670 | down from #6 |
| 9 | Three to a royal flush | 10c Jc Qc 7d 4h | 2.0259 | up from #11 |
| 10 | Two pair | 4c Jc 9d Jd 4h | 1.5957 | down from #9 |
| 11 | Four to a flush | 4c 2h 6h 9h Jh | 1.5957 | up from #12 |
| 12 | High pair (jacks or better) | 7c Jc 9d Jd 4h | 1.3943 | down from #10 |
| 13 | Four to an open-ended straight | 5c 8c 2d 6d 7h | 1.3617 | up from #14 |
| 14 | Three to a straight flush, no gap | 6c 7c 8c Kd 2h | 1.2683 | up from #15 |
| 15 | Four to an inside straight, 3 high cards | 3c Kc Qd Jh 9s | 0.8723 | up from #17 |
| 16 | Low pair | 6c Kc 3d 6d 9h | 0.6814 | down from #13 |
| 17 | Four to an inside straight, fewer than 3 high cards | 5c 9c 2d 8d 7h | 0.6809 | up from #22 |
| 18 | Garbage (discard all five) | 2c 5d 6d 9h 3s | 0.6809 | up from #21 |
| 19 | Two suited high cards | Qc Kc 7d 4h 3s | 0.6230 | down from #16 |
| 20 | Suited ten/high card (e.g. JT suited) | 10c Jc 7d 4h 3s | 0.5735 | down from #18 |
| 21 | Two unsuited high cards | Kc 7d Qd 4h 3s | 0.4819 | down from #19 |
| 22 | One lone high card | 3c Kc 2d 6d 9h | 0.4370 | down from #20 |
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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