The Cost of Misplaying Bad Jacks or Better Starting Hands

Published: January 8, 2015

A major part of learning to be extremely good at Jacks or Better video poker is learning how to get the most out of the hands that seem like they are worth the least. We want to give you some examples of how misplaying these hands with what seems like logical strategy can actually cost you quite a bit in total average payouts. Our hope is that players are able to look at these examples and find some ways that they can improve their own game by getting better at playing bad starting hands.

Let's start with a good example like KsJhTh6s4d. To start with, the correct play is to keep the JhTh combination and to discard everything else. This is somewhat anti-intuitive, and a lot of experienced players would keep the KJ combination instead. The key here is that a suited JT/QT/KT is stronger than two offsuit cards in most cases. The suited JT scores about 0.501x on average while the offsuit KJ scores about 0.486x. This can seem like a small difference, but those differences add up in a major way since you'll face lots of hands like this during your sessions.

A related hand is AdTdQh7s3c. Something important to note is that the suited AT combination is not very powerful when compared to KT/QT/JT, and in this situation, it's actually better to go with the offsuit AQ combo. Here, the offsuit AQ gives 0.474x while the suited AT only gives 0.450x. This is a larger difference than what we looked at in the previous hand, and it's just another example of how playing bad hands correctly can give your bottom line a bit of a bump over time.

Finally we have our final hand which is KhQdJc8s5d. The general rule that most people follow is to keep the two smallest high cards in your hand when you have three that are offsuit. However, the KQJ offsuit combination is stronger and yields an average payout of 0.515x. By comparison, QJ offsuit gives 0.491x while KQ gives 0.479x. Again what you see here is that accurate play is not always intuitive, but it does make a major dent in your overall winrate over the course of a session. Picking up an extra 0.015x a total of 60 times during a long session is worth an entire extra bet, and that's a big deal.