CARD GAMES
Poker on a phone: the room, the video machine and the difference
Two completely different products share the word. A poker room is players against each other with the house taking a rake, and video poker is a machine with a published return that basic play can get close to 99.5%.
Assumes nine-six Jacks or Better video poker, played correctly. Change the ruleset and every figure on this page moves.
Every bet, with what it costs
| Bet | Pays | House edge | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jacks or Better, 9/6 paytable | 9 for a full house, 6 for a flush | 0.46% | The best common machine, played perfectly |
| Jacks or Better, 8/5 paytable | 8 and 5 | 2.7% | Same game, two numbers changed on the paytable |
| Deuces Wild, full pay | varies | 0.24% | Rare online, and the strategy is a different chart |
| Cash game rake | n/a | 5% | Typically 5% of the pot to a cap, taken from every hand |
| Tournament fee | n/a | 8% | The number after the plus sign on the buy-in |
Cheapest and most expensive on the same table are 0.24% and 8%. Nothing about the room changes between those two rows; the only difference is which one you tapped.
What an hour costs
Stake, times rounds an hour, times the edge. That is the whole formula and pace is the term people forget: the same game dealt twice as fast costs twice as much. The full table across every game is in what an hour costs.
The rake is the game
In a cash game the house does not play. It takes a percentage of each pot, usually five percent up to a cap of a few dollars, and that is where the money goes. You are not beating a house edge, you are beating the other players by more than the rake takes.
That distinction matters because it changes what winning looks like. A break-even player at a raked table is a losing player. The margin you need is not against the game, it is against everyone else at the table plus a fee.
Video poker is a machine with a chart
Five cards, hold what you want, draw the rest, get paid off a printed table. Because the deck is known and the paytable is printed, the correct hold in every one of the two and a half million starting hands can be computed, and it has been.
A full-pay Jacks or Better machine returns 99.54% to a player making every correct hold. That is the best published return in a Canadian lobby by a wide margin, and it evaporates the moment the paytable changes, which is why the two numbers on the full house and flush lines are the first thing to look at.
Five hundred hands an hour is a comfortable phone pace. At C$1.25 a hand that is over six hundred dollars of staking, so even half a percent is real money and two and a half percent is a bad evening.
Which one you want
If you want a game where study pays, the room is the one. It is also the one where the other people have studied, and a phone screen is the worst place to be doing that work.
If you want a low-cost hour with a chart you can learn in a weekend, the machine is the one. Nobody at the table is better than you, because there is no table.
On a phone
- Multi-tabling does not work on a phone and nobody should pretend otherwise. One table, portrait, is the honest limit and it is also the one that keeps you reading the table.
- Video poker holds are five small buttons under five cards. On a 390 pixel screen the touch targets are marginal, and a mis-hold is an immediate and permanent cost.
- Poker rooms time you out on a disconnect and a subway tunnel is a disconnect. Sit-and-go on a commute is a bad idea for reasons that have nothing to do with strategy.
- Check the paytable inside the app before the first hand. The nine and the six are printed on the machine and they are the difference between a half percent game and a near three percent one.
Where the tables are
40 of the operators on our board carry live tables, 5900 between them. More tables mostly means a shorter wait at your stake level rather than a better product.
Poker questions people actually type
What is the house edge in poker?
0.46% at nine-six Jacks or Better video poker, played correctly. That is C$0.46 for every C$100 staked, and the worst bet on the same felt costs 8%.