Video poker looks like a slot machine with cards, and most players treat it that way: hold whatever feels right and hope. That approach throws away the one real advantage the game offers. Unlike slots, where the outcome is pure chance, video poker is a decision problem with a mathematically correct answer for every deal. Correct play is not intuition. It is a lookup process. Here is a single hand walked through decision by decision, so you can see how the lookup works and why the order matters.
Reading the variant and the paytable before the first hold
Suppose the lobby is Imperial Wins, you are playing from Canada, and the cashier has already priced your session in Canadian dollars. You pick a Jacks or Better machine because you have read that it has a low house edge. That is only half true. The 9/6 version, which pays 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush, returns about 99.5 percent with perfect play. The 8/5 version on the next machine over returns closer to 97.3 percent. Same game name, same look, materially different return figures. Before you insert a single CAD deposit into the machine, read the paytable for the full house and flush lines. If the numbers are 8/5, walk to the next machine.
Variant matters even more than paytable rows. Jacks or Better, Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus, and Deuces Wild all reward different hands and therefore demand different strategy charts. Double Double Bonus pays a premium for four aces with a kicker, so it changes what you hold from a pair of aces. Deuces Wild makes the deuce a wild card, which reshuffles the entire priority order. Playing one variant’s strategy on another variant’s machine is the most common leak I see. The chart is variant-specific, and so is the paytable. Confirm both before you sit down.
Underneath all of this, game outcomes come from random number generators supplied with the games, and the major game providers publish return figures that assume optimal play. That last clause matters. The advertised return is not what the average player gets. It is what a player following the chart gets. Everything below is about closing that gap.
| Variant | What it rewards | Strategy shift to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Jacks or Better (9/6) | Two pair, full house, flush balance | Baseline chart, hold high pairs over three-card flushes |
| Bonus Poker | Four of a kind, especially aces | Break some two pairs to chase four-card draws to aces |
| Double Double Bonus | Aces and low kickers | Hold a single ace with a kicker on some deals |
| Deuces Wild | Wild deuces in almost every hand | Deuce is wild, so pairs and flushes drop in priority |
Applying the strategy chart’s priority order to one deal
Here is the hand. You are dealt the ace of spades, king of spades, queen of spades, jack of spades, and the seven of hearts. New players often hold the four-card straight flush and the ace, or they hold all five out of habit, or they hold the four spades plus the ace to chase a royal. The chart does not care what feels lucky. https://imperialwinscanada.ca/ has more details on this topic. It ranks hands by expected value, and you scan from the top until something matches. In Jacks or Better, a four-card straight flush ranks above a low pair, above three cards to a royal flush, and above a high pair. So you hold the four spades and discard the seven. That is the whole decision. No intuition, just a lookup against a ranked list.
Change one card and the lookup changes. Deal the same four spades but replace the seven with a second ace. Now you have a four-card straight flush and a high pair competing. The chart still puts the four-card straight flush first in Jacks or Better, so the hold is the same four spades. Now imagine the four spades are not connected, say ace, jack, eight, and four. The four-card flush draw drops far down the list, below a high pair, below a low pair in some charts, and below three cards to a royal. You hold the pair instead. The lesson is that the rank order is fixed, and your job is only to identify which rows of the chart your deal matches.
This is why the paytable and the chart are inseparable. A four-card straight flush paying 50 for the flush and 25 for the straight in a 9/6 game justifies the aggressive hold. In an 8/5 game the same hold is still correct, but the surrounding decisions tighten, and the return figures fall. If you want to test the process without money, most slots and video poker games on the site open in practice mode without an account, so you can run fifty hands against the chart and check your accuracy. The game library at Imperial Wins passes a thousand titles, and the video poker section is where that practice pays off. Titles like Big Bass Splash and 3 Pots Riches: Hold and Win are slots and do not use this logic at all, which is a useful contrast: the chart only works on games with a published paytable and a fixed draw.
Verification and the cashier sit outside the hand itself but decide whether the session is worth the effort. Account verification decides payout speed, and a slow e-wallet withdrawal turns a 99.5 percent game into a frustrating afternoon. Withdrawals take roughly a day on an e-wallet and the better part of a working week on a bank transfer or card, so plan the cashout route before you play, not after. The cashier lists more than twenty payment methods, all priced in Canadian dollars for players from Canada, and the opening package of CAD 1,000 with 150 free spins arrives with a playthrough clause attached. Read that clause. A generous bonus with a punishing playthrough can wipe out the edge the chart just earned you.
The practical wrap-up is short. Pick the variant, confirm the paytable rows, pull up the matching strategy chart, and work the priority order from the top for every deal. Hold the first row that matches and discard the rest. Run a few hundred practice hands until the lookup becomes fast enough to use at speed. The players who beat this game are not luckier than you. They just stopped guessing and started reading the list. If you want a broader view of the site before committing, an Imperial Wins review will cover the licence line, the support desk, and the encrypted connection, but none of that changes the hand. The chart does.