Low pair or high cards: the video poker hold, priced on the 8/5 table

How a hold is priced

After the deal you can see five cards and 47 are unseen. Whatever you keep, the replacements are drawn from those 47 without replacement, and every combination of them is equally likely. So the value of a hold is not a matter of feel: keep two cards and there are 16,215 ways the other three can come; keep four and there are 47. Add up the payout of every resulting hand, divide by the number of ways, and you have the expected return of that hold in units of the stake. Do it for each way of holding and the best one is the correct play.

One consequence is worth having in mind before the table. The engine draws replacements from a sequence that was fixed when the round was committed, in the order described in the cursor article, so the cards that arrive are not a response to your choice. But the price of each choice is the average over all the sequences that could have been committed, and that is what the numbers below are.

The classic dilemmas, priced

Every row is the exact average over all draws. “Returns” includes the stake: 1.00 means you get your bet back on average.

Three of these are the ones players get wrong most often, and the table says why each is wrong by a specific amount. The low pair looks like nothing and the two honours look like something, but the pair is worth 0.81 and the honours 0.49: the pair reaches trips, two pair, full houses and quads often enough to outweigh the honours’ frequent small save at ×1. A pair of jacks is a paid hand, and breaking it for a four-flush trades 1.53 for 1.06, a loss of almost half a unit; the flush comes in 9 draws out of 47, and ×5 is not enough to pay for the 38 misses. And three to the royal against a made flush is the romantic one: the flush pays 5.00, the chase returns 1.31, and the romance costs 3.69 units every time.

The two royal rows show where the chase does pay. With four to the royal, one of the 47 cards completes an ×800 hand and several others still make a flush or a straight, so the draw is worth 19.45 units, nearly five times a made straight. It is still not worth a made straight flush: ×50 in hand beats 18.47 on the draw, and the correct play is to keep the 9♥ and take the money.

What the 8/5 table changes

Every number above was computed on the table this engine deals, which since 10 September 2026 is 8/5: full house ×8, flush ×5. The full-pay 9/6 table it replaced paid one unit more on each of those rows, and the paytable article explains what that costs overall, about two points of return. What it does to the holds is smaller than people expect. The flush draw in row three is worth 1.09 here and would be worth about 1.17 on a 9/6 table; the pair of jacks in row two is worth 1.53 here and slightly more there, because a pair sometimes becomes a full house. The ranking of the holds does not change on any row in the table. The price of the game changed; the correct play did not.

That is the general shape of video poker strategy: the paytable sets the ceiling, the holds decide how close you play to it, and the two are mostly independent. A player who learned the ranking on 9/6 loses nothing by keeping it on 8/5. A player who reads the 8/5 label and decides the strategy no longer matters loses roughly a third of a unit every time a low pair sits next to two honours.