Video Poker Strategy
Joker Poker adds one wild card, the joker, to a 53-card deck. The full-pay "Kings or Better" version returns 100.6463% with perfect play, computed exactly by our engine and matching the accepted published figure to four decimal places. That is a real player edge before any comps, on the same short list as full-pay Deuces Wild.
Full pay is identified by the 20 / 7 / 5 line: four of a kind 20, full house 7, flush 5. Lower numbers on any of those three mean a short-pay machine giving back your edge. The minimum paying hand is a pair of Kings or Aces; some machines require two pair or better to win anything at all, which is a meaningfully worse game to play regardless of how the top of the pay table looks.
| Hand | Pays (per coin) |
|---|---|
| Natural Royal Flush | 800 |
| Five of a Kind | 200 |
| Wild Royal Flush | 100 |
| Straight Flush | 50 |
| Four of a Kind | 20 |
| Full House | 7 |
| Flush | 5 |
| Straight | 3 |
| Three of a Kind | 2 |
| Two Pair | 1 |
| Kings or Better | 1 |
Notice two pair and a pair of Kings/Aces pay the same (1 coin). Queens, Jacks, and every lower pair pay nothing at all — a real difference from Jacks or Better, where any pair of Jacks or better is a winner. The joker appears in a dealt hand about once every 11 hands (its true probability is 5/53 ≈ 9.4%), so most of your hands are played exactly like a no-wild-card game with a tighter pairs rule.
Hold the highest-ranked pattern your hand matches. Every EV below is engine-exact for the specific example hand shown, the same computation used throughout this site; a few hands near a boundary can shift slightly with the exact ranks involved, so check the hand analyzer for anything unusual.
| Hold (first match wins) | Example hand | EV/coin |
|---|---|---|
| Natural royal flush (pat) | 10s Js Qs Ks As | 800.00 |
| Five of a kind (pat) | JOKER 7c 7d 7h 7s | 200.00 |
| Wild royal flush (pat) | JOKER 10s Js Qs Ks | 100.00 |
| Straight flush (pat) | 6c 7c 8c 9c 10c | 50.00 |
| Four of a kind (pat) | 8c 8d 8h 8s 3d | 23.75 |
| Four to a royal flush (no joker) | 10c Jc Qc Kc 3d | 20.96 |
| Joker + three to a royal flush | JOKER Jc Qc Kc 3d | 7.29 |
| Full house (pat) | 9c 9d 9h 4c 4d | 7.00 |
| Flush (pat), or joker + four-flush | 2h 6h 9h Jh Kh | 5.00 |
| Three of a kind, or joker + a pair | 8c 8d 8h 3c Kd | 3.94 |
| Straight (pat), or joker + four to a straight | 5c 6d 7h 8c 9d | 3.00 |
| Two pair (no joker) | Jc Jd 4h 4c 9d | 1.63 |
| Three to a royal flush (no joker) | 10c Jc Qc 4h 7d | 1.49 |
| Joker alone (draw four) | JOKER 2c 7d 9h 4s | 1.43 |
| Kings or Aces pair (no joker) | Kc Kd 4h 7c 9d | 1.40 |
| Four to a flush (no joker) | 2h 6h 9h Jh 4c | 1.04 |
| Queens, Jacks, or any lower pair (does not pay, no joker) | Qc Qd 4h 7s 9c | 0.73 |
| Two suited high cards, Ace-King down to Jack-10 (no joker) | Ac Kc 4h 7d 3s | 0.58 |
| Four to an open straight, no high cards (no joker) | 5c 6d 7h 8c 2d | 0.56 |
Joker Poker strategy is really two much simpler games layered together. About 90.6% of the time you are dealt no joker at all, and you play a hand that looks almost exactly like Jacks or Better, except only Kings and Aces pay as a pair — Jacks and Queens are worth keeping only for their improvement potential (three of a kind, two pair, a flush or straight draw), never for an immediate payout. The other roughly 9.4% of the time you have the joker, and the calculus flips: the joker is always held, and the only real decision is which of your other four cards, if any, are worth keeping alongside it.
With the joker, the ranking is short: a made hand (three of a kind or better) is always held pat. Short of a made hand, a four-card draw toward a royal, straight, or flush beats almost anything else, since the joker functions as a guaranteed fifth card. With nothing else going for the other four cards, hold the joker alone and draw four — our engine did find a small, genuine exception where keeping one specific kicker alongside the joker edges out holding the joker alone by a few hundredths of a coin, but the margin is small enough that "hold the joker, draw four" is the right simple rule for the table, and the hand analyzer will catch the rare cases where a kicker is worth a fraction more.
The single biggest mistake players bring from Jacks or Better is holding a pair of Jacks or Queens as if it were a made hand. It isn't, in this game — it pays exactly nothing. Our engine confirms a Queens pair is worth noticeably less (0.73 per coin in the example above) than a Kings pair (1.40), precisely because Kings and Aces pay immediately and Queens don't. Treat a Jack or Queen pair the way you'd treat any non-paying pair: worth keeping only if the alternative is worse, never as a hand you're satisfied with.
The joker evaluator was checked exhaustively over all 2,869,685 possible five-card hands from the 53-card deck, with several category counts cross-checked against independently derived combinatorial formulas (for example, exactly 4 natural royal flushes and exactly 20 wild royal flushes are dealt-hand-possible, both confirmed exact). The full game's overall return was then validated against five different published pay tables, including this full-pay table's 100.6463%, all matching to four decimal places. See the methodology page for how the engine works in general.
The trainer deals real Joker Poker hands with the joker in the deck, grades every hold against this exact engine, and tracks your accuracy. If you want to check one specific hand by itself, the hand analyzer works for this pay table too.
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