Video Poker Strategy Memorization Without the Headache
I spent about three years grinding video poker on old-style machines in Las Vegas and online before I bothered learning actual strategy charts instead of playing by feel. The first thing anyone tells you to memorize is the classic rhyme. Most people learn it in their teens and forget it within a month because the way it is usually presented is too compressed. This rhyme is a memory aid for Jacks or Better video poker decision-making. Here is the full version most players need to actually use at the table: The Professor gives his hand to the bank.
The Banker keeps his pair and makes no mistake.
The Suicide King will play a king, or better, for a straight.
But flushes come before the straight.
That last line is the one that actually matters in practice. Most beginners miss it and try to remember the order of priority for drawing hands, which is where everything falls apart. When you are sitting at a full-pay Jacks or Better machine paying 9 for 1 on a full house and 6 for 1 on a flush, you are working with a house edge of about 0.46 percent if you play perfectly. That number means something if you are playing 600 hands an hour. It translates to roughly $3 an hour in expected loss on a dollar machine. It is the closest thing to a favorable game in most casinos, but only if you are actually playing optimally. Most people are not. They are playing by gut instinct, and the gut instinct is wrong about 70 percent of the time on marginal holdings. The rhyme itself maps to these rules:
The Professor gives his hand to the bank means whenever you have a royal flush draw, you hold all four cards and draw one. Do not break it up. This applies regardless of whether you also have a lower pair sitting alongside it, which brings us to the next line. The Banker keeps his pair and makes no mistake means a pair of jacks or better is always held as a pair. You never break a qualifying pair to chase a draw. This is the single most common mistake I see from casual players. They get a pair of jacks and four cards to a flush and they throw away the pair. The math does not support that play by any reasonable measure. The Suicide King will play a king, or better, for a straight means when you are considering drawing to an open-ended straight draw, you need at least four cards to an inside-open combination that includes a king or higher. A hand like 9-10-J-Q gives you two possible cards to complete the straight. But a hand like 4-5-6-7 only gives you two eights and a nine. The expected value difference between those two draws is significant, and the rhyme encodes that distinction for you.
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Flushes come before the straight is the priority rule. If you have both a four-card flush draw and a four-card straight draw, you hold the flush draw. This is counter to what most people assume intuitively because straights seem more frequent in casual observation. They are not, not in the way that matters for expected value calculations on a single draw from a 47-card deck. I ran into a specific edge case once that nobody warns you about. You are dealt a hand containing three cards to a royal, two cards to a flush, and a kicker card that happens to also complete a low pair. Let me make this concrete: you are holding 10-J-Q of spades, 4-5 of hearts, and you also have a pair of fours from somewhere else in the hand. Wait, that is impossible in a five-card deal. Let me restate this properly. You are dealt: 10-J-Q of spades, 4 of hearts, 4 of diamonds. You have three cards to a royal flush and a pair of fours. The correct play according to standard strategy charts is to hold the pair of fours and draw three cards. You do not chase the royal draw. The expected value of holding the pair is approximately 1.48 coins per coin bet. The expected value of the royal draw is roughly 1.21. The difference is small, about 0.27 coins per hand, but over thousands of hands it compounds into real money. I learned this the hard way after losing about $400 over a weekend because I kept making the wrong call on borderline hands like this one.
Here is the part most strategy guides skip: the rhyme only covers the highest-priority decisions. It does not tell you what to do when you have nothing, a low pair, or a high card draw. For those situations you need a full strategy chart, not a rhyme. The chart typically breaks down into about 25 distinct decision categories for Jacks or Better, ranging from holding a royal flush draw all the way down to breaking a low pair for a high card when the composition is unusual enough to change the math. The deeper problem with relying on a rhyme alone is that video poker games have varied pay tables, and the optimal strategy shifts depending on the payout structure. A 9/6 Jacks or Better game has different optimal plays than a 8/5 version, which is the most common trap I see. Players learn the rhyme for 9/6, then sit down at an 8/5 machine and play identically, gaining an extra 1.5 percent in house edge through ignorance. That changes the expected hourly loss from about $3 to about $12 on the same betting pattern. It is worth checking the pay table before you start playing any machine, not just once but every time you switch games. Another counter-intuitive point that beginners miss involves four-card draws that contain a gap. A hand like A-2-3-4 to a straight is technically an open-ended draw, but the cards are so low that some strategy charts recommend holding it differently depending on whether you also have a flush draw competing for the same four slots. In the vast majority of cases you still hold the flush draw over the gap straight, but there are rare composition-specific situations where the straight actually edges out. The rhyme does not capture that level of granularity, and that is why people who rely exclusively on it eventually lose ground against players using a full strategy chart.
If you want a proper strategy chart, most reputable video poker websites publish them for free. The key is finding one that specifies the exact pay table you are playing against. Downloading a generic chart and applying it blindly is worse than having no chart at all, because it gives you a false sense of precision while actually leading you astray on the marginal hands where the differences matter most. The practical takeaway is straightforward. Learn the rhyme as a framework for the biggest decisions, then supplement it with a complete strategy chart for everything else. Practice on free play machines until the calls become automatic, because making the right decision while thinking about it during a live session is nearly impossible. Your brain needs to route the decision through the chart in under three seconds, or you will start second-guessing and losing edge that way too.
