The Atypical All American Video Poker Payout Schedule

Published: October 30, 2014

In the video poker world, there are certain things that you just take for granted. For example, you take for granted that high pairs are worth more than draws, and you also take for granted that three-card royal flush draws are better than four-card draws to regular flushes. All American Video Poker is the exception to a lot of the rules that you learn because it has a very atypical paytable that pays out higher wins for common made hands, and if you don't learn to play around the differences that this type of situation creates, then you'll end up in a mess with a low payout rate.

The main feature of the payout table is that jacks or better pay 1x, two pair also pay 1x, three of a kind are 3x while straights, flushes and full houses all have the same 8x payout. This is massive compared to the 9/6/5 payouts that you normally have for these three hands in Jacks or Better, and it's something you have to learn to adjust to in a large number of hands. We're going to look at some examples here to give you an idea of what we mean.

First thing's first: Both major draws are better than high pairs. So if you have something like KKQJT without any interesting suits for flushes and without three to a royal, then you need to play with the KQJT. The exception to this is when you have exactly JJT98 in which case you should go with the JJ, but it's only a difference of about 0.4 percent of the size of your bet in terms of how much you're going to lose on average by making the worse of the two plays.

Another important point to make is that gutshot straight draws can be stronger than low pairs in a lot of cases depending on how many high cards you have available. If there's going to be at least one high card (jack or better) in your drawing hand, then keeping a gutshot straight draw is better than keeping a low pair. This is a really atypical situation that only really comes in in this particular type of video poker, and it's a situation that goes to show that you really have to adjust in really big ways when you play All American because of the 8x payouts for flushes and straights.