How to play
Aces and Faces rewards the cards you already like to keep. It’s single-hand draw poker: five cards, one chance to swap, and the pay table decides what you win. Nobody else sits at the table.
The flow takes a few seconds per hand. Set your stake from 1 to 5 credits (Bet one adds a credit at a time; Bet max puts 5 down and deals immediately), or press Deal at the current stake. Touch the cards you want to keep so they show Held, then press Draw to replace the rest from the same deck. A new shuffle of all 52 cards starts the next hand.
You begin with 1,000 virtual credits. Hint, after an optional short ad, highlights the mathematically best hold for the five cards in front of you. If the balance hits zero, a button offers another 1,000 free credits.
Pay table
Per-credit payouts. Multiply by your bet, except the 5-credit royal, which pays 4,000.
| Hand | Pays per credit |
|---|---|
| Royal Flush | 250 |
| Straight Flush | 50 |
| Four Aces | 80 |
| Four Jacks, Queens or Kings | 40 |
| Four 2s through 10s | 25 |
| Full House | 8 |
| Flush | 5 |
| Straight | 4 |
| Three of a Kind | 3 |
| Two Pair | 2 |
| Pair of Jacks or better | 1 |
The quads are split into three tiers by rank. Aces sit at the top, the three face cards share a middle tier at 40, and everything from 2 to 10 pays the standard 25. Compare that with Bonus Poker, which uses the same 8/5 base but gives its 40-tier to low cards (2s, 3s and 4s) instead of faces.
What the face-card bonus does
Since the bonus ranks are also the ranks that make a paying pair, Aces and Faces fits neatly with ordinary Jacks or Better habits. A pair of Kings is already a winner, and three Kings now carry a better shot at a big pay. Under perfect play:
- Four Jacks, Queens or Kings land about once every 1,704 hands, roughly three times as often as a hand of four Aces on a typical bonus table.
- The whole game returns 99.26% at 5 credits, worked out exactly over every deal and every hold.
- About 45.5% of hands end on a paying line.
The price of the bonuses is the full house at 8 and the flush at 5, one credit less each than on the 9/6 Jacks or Better table.
Strategy
Most decisions are the same as in Jacks or Better, and the face-card bonus makes high cards a little more attractive, never less. A few spots where people hesitate, checked against the game’s exact hold values:
- A pair of Kings with four to a flush (K♣ K♦ 3♣ 6♣ 9♣): keep the Kings. The pair is worth about 1.57 per credit, the flush draw about 1.42. A paying pair already in hand beats a four-card flush on this table.
- Three face cards of mixed suits (J♣ Q♦ K♥ plus two low cards): hold all three. It edges out keeping only two of them.
- A-K-Q of mixed suits: hold just K-Q and let the Ace go. Two cards that can fill a straight in more ways are worth slightly more than the lone Ace here.
- Two pair including Aces (A♣ A♦ K♣ K♠ 5♥): keep both pairs. Two pair pays 2 on this table, which makes the four-card hold clearly better than the Aces alone.
- Three of a kind: hold the three and draw two. A kicker never helps when there’s no kicker bonus.
Always play 5 credits so the royal pays its full 4,000. And remember that strategy only decides how close you get to the 99.26% figure; the small edge left for the house is fixed by the table.
If you enjoy Aces and Faces, try Acey Deucey or All American Poker next.
