How to play
Reel Poker looks like a slot machine but plays like Jacks or Better. Instead of one five-card hand, the draw fills a grid of three rows and five columns, and nine pay lines run through it. Every line is read as its own poker hand.
You start with 1,000 virtual credits.
- Pick your bet per line, 1 to 5. All nine lines are always played, so the total bet is nine times that: 9 credits at the lowest setting, 45 at the top.
- Press Deal. Five cards appear in the middle row only; the top and bottom rows stay empty.
- Tap the cards you want to keep. A held card is tagged HELD, and when you draw it is copied into the top and bottom of its column as well.
- Press Draw. Every empty place in the grid gets a fresh card. They all come from the same 47 cards that were left after the deal, middle row first, then top, then bottom, so no card shows up twice except the held ones.
- Each of the nine lines is paid on its own, and the line numbers beside the grid light up for the winners.
How the nine lines run
Lines 1 to 3 are the plain rows: middle, top, bottom. Lines 4 and 5 are a V and an upside-down V. Lines 6 and 7 are staircases that drop (or climb) from one corner to the opposite corner. Lines 8 and 9 start and end in the middle row and bow up through the top row or down through the bottom row.
A neat property of this layout: every one of the 15 places in the grid sits on exactly three lines. So a single lucky card in an empty column always touches three hands at once, never one and never all nine.
Pay table
Payouts are per credit bet on a line, and each line pays independently. This is the standard 8/5 Jacks or Better table.
| Hand | Pays |
|---|---|
| Royal flush | 250, or 800 at 5 per line |
| Straight flush | 50 |
| Four of a kind | 25 |
| Full house | 8 |
| Flush | 5 |
| Straight | 4 |
| Three of a kind | 3 |
| Two pair | 2 |
| Jacks or better (a pair of J, Q, K or A) | 1 |
At 5 per line, a royal flush on one line is worth 4,000 credits.
Strategy
The best hold in Reel Poker is exactly the best hold in ordinary one-hand Jacks or Better. That sounds surprising, but each line’s empty places are filled with different random cards from the same 47, so every single line is distributed just like one normal draw. Whatever hold has the highest average for one hand has the highest average for nine.
The Hint button works it out for your current cards and tells you which positions to keep. The main ideas behind it:
- Keep any hand that already pays, except break a flush or straight when you hold four to a royal flush.
- A pair of jacks or better beats almost any draw. A low pair still beats two high cards and an inside straight.
- Four to a flush is worth more than a low pair; four to an open straight isn’t.
- With no pair and no draw, keep your jacks, queens, kings and aces, and prefer high cards that share a suit.
- With nothing at all, hold nothing and let the grid fill fifteen new cards.
What changes is how results feel. Because the lines share held cards, wins arrive in clusters. Keep a pair of kings and the middle row, top row and bottom row all start from that pair, so most draws pay on several lines. Hold four to a royal and three different cards come in for the missing column; the chance that one of them completes the royal is 3 in 47, and when it does, that royal pays on three lines.
The return
Since each line behaves like a single draw, the game returns exactly what 8/5 Jacks or Better does with perfect play: 97.30% at 5 credits per line. Below 5 per line the royal pays 250 per credit instead of 800, which costs roughly 1.4% of return. If you play at all, play the full 5 per line or accept that the top prize is shrunk.
Swings are larger than in one-hand poker because nine hands ride on one set of held cards.
If you’d rather see each hand drawn from its own deck, Multi-Hand Poker does that, and plain Video Poker is the single-hand version of the same table.
If you enjoy Reel Poker, try Ride the Bus or Road Cross next.
