VIDEO POKER HOLD CHART
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How Stake Video Poker Works
Stake Video Poker is built on classic single-deck Jacks-or-Better. You are dealt five cards from a freshly shuffled 52-card deck. You then choose which cards to hold and which to discard. The discarded cards are replaced by the next cards in the deck, giving you a final five-card hand. If that hand is a pair of Jacks or better, you are paid according to the paytable, up to 800x for a royal flush.
The single decision, which cards to hold, is the entire game. Unlike Diamonds or Dice, where you press a button and accept whatever the RNG gives you, video poker hands you a genuine choice that changes your expected return. That is why it is classified as a skill game and why it can reach 99% RTP: the math rewards correct play.
"Jacks or Better" simply means the minimum paying hand is a pair of Jacks. Anything lower, a pair of tens or worse, returns nothing. This threshold shapes the entire strategy, because holding high cards that can pair into a paying hand is consistently more valuable than chasing long-shot draws.
RTP & the Skill Condition
Stake advertises its single-deck Video Poker at 99% RTP, a roughly 1% house edge. That puts it among the best-value games in the casino, on par with Dice and well ahead of slots at 94 to 96%. But there is a condition attached that most pages bury: the 99% only materialises if you play every hand with optimal hold strategy.
This is the crucial honesty point. In Dice or Baccarat the RTP is fixed no matter what you do. In video poker, the advertised RTP is the ceiling you reach with perfect play, and every suboptimal hold leaks value below it. A casual player guessing at holds might be playing an effective 96 or 97% game without realising it. The paytable sets the maximum return; your decisions determine how much of it you actually collect.
The top of the paytable, the royal flush at 800x, is what justifies always betting the maximum where the option exists. Royals are rare (roughly 1 in 40,000 hands under optimal play), but the outsized payout is a meaningful slice of the total RTP. Skipping max bet on classic video poker forfeits part of that, which is why the convention is to play full coins.
The Optimal Hold Chart
This is the heart of video poker strategy. The optimal play is mechanical: rank every possible way to hold your dealt cards by expected value, then keep the highest-ranked hold that your five cards can make. Start at the top of the list and stop at the first match. The table below is the simplified Jacks-or-Better priority order.
| Priority | Hold This | Over |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pat royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind | Everything |
| 2 | Four to a royal flush | Made flush or straight |
| 3 | Full house, flush, straight, three of a kind | Lesser draws |
| 4 | Four to a straight flush | High pair |
| 5 | Two pair | High pair |
| 6 | High pair (Jacks or better) | Any 3-4 card draw |
| 7 | Four to a flush | Low pair |
| 8 | Low pair (tens or lower) | Two/three high cards |
| 9 | Four to an outside straight | High cards |
| 10 | Two or three high cards | Drawing five new |
| 11 | Discard everything, redraw five | Nothing playable |
The single most common beginner mistake is reading this chart upside down. The classic example: you are dealt a high pair (say two Queens) plus three cards to a flush. Instinct says chase the flush. The chart says hold the pair. The guaranteed value of a paying high pair, plus its upside to two pair, trips, or a full house, outweighs the one-in-many flush draw. Hold the pair, discard the three suited cards. Whenever instinct and the chart disagree, the chart is right.
A second key rule: a paying high pair always beats a four-card straight or flush draw that is not also a straight-flush draw. And four to a royal is so valuable it ranks above almost every made hand short of a straight flush, because the 800x payout dwarfs the alternatives. Memorise the top six rows and you will capture the vast majority of the available RTP.
How the Deck Shuffle Is Verified
Here is the moat that no other video poker page covers, and it is especially important here because video poker has a redraw. A natural worry is: once I choose my holds, could the casino rig the replacement cards against me? In a provably fair game the answer is provably no, and you can demonstrate it. The entire deck order, both the deal and every possible redraw, is fixed before you see a single card.
Step 1 — Commit the deck
Before the hand, the casino generates a secret server seed and shows you its SHA-256 hash. You hold a client seed you can change and a nonce that increments each round. The hash commits the casino to that server seed before any card is dealt.
Step 2 — Shuffle from the seeds
The game computes HMAC-SHA256(server seed, client seed:nonce) into a byte stream and runs a Fisher-Yates shuffle over the 52-card deck. This fixes the complete order of all 52 cards. Your first five cards are the top of that ordering; positions six onward are the redraw pile, already determined.
Step 3 — Hold, redraw, resolve
You choose your holds. Each discarded card is replaced by the next card in the pre-shuffled deck (position 6, then 7, and so on). Because that order was locked in Step 2, the cards you receive on the redraw were sealed before you decided anything. Your decision selects which sealed cards you draw, but it cannot change what they are.
Step 4 — Reveal and confirm
Rotate your seed pair and the old server seed is revealed. SHA-256 it to match the Step 1 commitment, recompute the HMAC, and re-run the Fisher-Yates shuffle. If the reproduced deck order yields exactly your dealt cards and the exact replacements you received, the hand was provably honest, redraw included. Our provably fair verifier checks that a revealed server seed matches its SHA-256 commitment, but it has no video poker mode, so recompute the result itself with Stake’s own verifier or the published algorithm.
Why This Matters
The redraw is exactly where a dishonest operator would cheat, and exactly what provably fair eliminates. The replacement cards were committed before you touched a hold button, so the only thing influencing your result is your own strategy and the pre-sealed deck. This is the same shuffle-verification logic behind crypto baccarat and crypto blackjack. Learn the full framework in what is provably fair gambling.
Skill Helps, But It Cannot Flip the Edge
Video poker is genuinely a skill game, but it is important to be honest about what that skill does. Optimal play does not give you an edge over the casino; it lets you reach the advertised 99% RTP instead of donating extra on top of the built-in 1%. The house edge is still there. Skill closes the leak, it does not reverse the flow.
Each hand is independent. The deck is reshuffled from a fresh nonce every round, so a cold streak does not make a royal "due." Past hands carry no information, exactly as the provably fair construction proves.
Bet progressions do nothing. Martingale and similar systems only reshape the order of wins and losses around the fixed 1% edge. They cannot manufacture a long-run profit, and on a low-edge game they mostly just increase your risk of a sharp drawdown.
The real edge is discipline. Play the hold chart precisely, bet a consistent fraction of your bankroll, set a stop-loss and profit target, and treat video poker as a low-cost, decision-rich way to play. Done right, it is one of the best-value seats in the crypto casino, but only because you are playing the math correctly.
Where to Play Video Poker
Stake runs the single-deck 99% RTP Video Poker described here, with hotkeys for fast hold-and-draw play and full provably fair seed controls so you can verify the shuffle. You can set your client seed, view the hashed server seed before the deal, and rotate seeds to run the verification above. Read our Stake review, or compare platforms on our best crypto casinos list. Before playing anywhere, confirm the paytable (it sets your RTP ceiling) and that real seeds are exposed.
Key Takeaways
- 1. 99% RTP is the ceiling, not a guarantee. You only reach it with optimal hold play.
- 2. Hold the chart, not your gut. A paying high pair beats most draws; four-to-royal beats almost everything.
- 3. The royal flush pays 800x, which is why max-coin play is the convention.
- 4. The deal and redraw are verifiable via HMAC-SHA256 driving a Fisher-Yates shuffle.
- 5. Skill closes the leak, not the edge. Optimal play reaches 99%; it does not beat the house.