In video poker, the paytable is part of the game

The royal-flush row reads 250, 500, 750, 1,000, then 4,000. The fifth column breaks the progression. In that published video poker paytable, multiplying the first award by five would give the wrong result.

A paytable connects a finished hand to an award for a particular bet setting. Reading it means matching the game variant, credit value and selected column. This guide is for readers decoding those amounts, rather than choosing which cards to hold or how much to gamble.

The examples use Loto-Québec's publicly linked English rules for Jacks or Better and Jacks or Better Jackpot, both marked Version 1799, checked on 23 October 2026. These documents describe named products; they do not establish which build or denomination a reader can access elsewhere.

X5 breaks the royal-flush progression

The ordinary Jacks or Better rules separate the selected bet value from the number of chips. Their X1 through X5 columns show the awards for one through five chips. Selected rows from PDF page 2 illustrate the difference:

For the full house and flush, the X5 award is five times X1. The royal-flush award is sixteen times X1, although the chip count is only five times larger.

Dividing by the number staked gives 250 award credits per staked credit at X1 and 800 at X5 for that royal flush. Those are conditional payout ratios. They do not tell us how often the hand occurs, what a session will return or whether increasing a stake is affordable.

The two ordinary-hand figures, 9 and 6, can serve as shorthand for the full-house and flush cells. They leave out the royal row and the other awards. A comparison reduced to those two numbers can miss a consequential difference elsewhere in the table.

A credit needs a denomination

An award of 45 credits still needs a monetary value. Consider a fictional one-hand ledger using that full-house cell and a credit worth 0.20 cash units. Five credits cost 1.00 cash unit; an award of 45 credits is worth 9.00.

Our ledger debits the 1.00 stake and then credits the displayed 9.00 award, leaving an 8.00 increase. It does not add the stake to the award a second time. If the invented denomination were 1.00 instead, the same credit counts would mean a 5.00 stake and a 45.00 award, for a 40.00 increase. These are currency-neutral accounting examples, not quoted available stakes or observed casino results.

Other interfaces expose more than one hand as well. BGaming's Jacks or Better rules distinguish the number of hands, coin value and coin amount before displaying the total bet.

For a hypothetical setting with three hands, five coins per hand and a coin worth 0.20 cash units, the cost is 3 × 5 × 0.20 = 3.00 cash units. That calculation explains the controls only. It neither applies Loto-Québec's awards to BGaming's product nor says those exact settings are available.

Changing a denomination changes the money attached to each credit. Changing the number of hands changes the total commitment. Neither operation supplies a missing paytable.

Jackpot is a different last cell

Loto-Québec's separate Jacks or Better Jackpot rules put a jackpot entry, rather than a fixed 4,000, in the X5 royal-flush cell. The jackpot requires an X5 wager and a royal flush.

That file allocates 1% of X5 stakes to the jackpot and says the jackpot value includes the royal-flush base win and jackpot share. It does not support importing the ordinary version's 4,000-credit award as an extra payment on top. The allocation is not evidence of an extra 1% charge to add to the worked stake.

Both English documents carry the same version number, but their full product names and final royal-flush cells differ. A version number without the product name is incomplete identification. The problem extends to casino games distributed in different versions, where similar artwork can conceal different rules.

Neither 9/6 nor 4,000 is an RTP

A payout amount does not provide the probability of receiving it. Calculating return to player, or RTP, also needs the outcome model and its assumptions about hold-and-draw decisions. A percentage calculated for another schedule cannot fill those gaps.

Great Britain's Gambling Commission distinguishes payout information from likelihood information in Remote Technical Standard 3. It requires relevant rules and prize information before a customer commits to gamble. Its guidance also says that theoretical RTP for games with a skill element should use an autoplay or standard published strategy. That is a British remote-gambling standard, not a rule governing the Québec documents.

This article calculates awards and stake conversions, not an optimal strategy or a game RTP. Our RTP explainer separates the long-run model from an individual's session.

For a disputed award, retain the full product name, rules screen, selected denomination and bet column alongside the round record. The studio and operator can have different responsibilities, so the operator needs enough detail to identify what was actually supplied. A screenshot of a familiar title alone cannot explain why one royal-flush cell says 4,000 and another names a jackpot.