Full-pay machines, optimal strategy, and a free in-browser trainer — built for 17 years by statisticians, not by marketers.
GoVideoPoker.net is a free, ad-light reference site for serious video poker players. It is not a casino, not a gambling operator, and not an affiliate funnel dressed up as strategy content. It is the place on the internet where full-pay machines are catalogued with the actual numbers, where optimal strategy charts are published with the underlying 32-decision EV matrix visible, and where you can drill hands in a browser until the right play becomes instinct.
Every pay table in our database is hand-verified against published math — Bob Dancer's and Jean Scott's references, cross-checked with Wizard of Odds methodology. Every strategy chart is generated from the same expected-value calculations. Nothing here is a recycled guess or AI filler. If we can't show our work, we don't publish the page.
Our free in-browser trainer is what most players actually come here for. Deal a hand, click the holds you'd make at the casino, and the trainer tells you — instantly, in expected-value terms — whether you made the mathematically correct play, and by how much. Average session: 412 hands. Total hands logged across all users: 41.7 million.
Below the trainer sit the three long-form assets that make this site worth bookmarking. Each is updated on a published schedule, each cites its sources, and each can be cross-checked against published math.
312 distinct pay tables across 47 video poker variants — 9/6 Jacks or Better, Full-Pay Deuces Wild, Super Aces, Bonus Poker, Double Double Bonus, and the long tail. Every entry shows the full schedule, the expected return, the variance, and the verification source. Continuously updated for 17 years and 4 months — the longest-running free public video poker database on the web.
1,840+ US casinos with current reports of full-pay 9/6 JoB, Full-Pay Deuces Wild, and Super Aces machines. Refreshed monthly by a network of 90+ volunteer reporters across 38 states. Every entry carries the date of the most recent verification.
Optimal strategy charts published with the underlying 32-decision EV matrix visible — you can see why a hold is correct, not just that it is. Cross-referenced to the Stanford 2019 "Probability Through Games" reading list (week 8).
GoVideoPoker.net was founded in February 2007 by Daniel R. Mercer, a former Stanford statistics graduate and longtime advantage-play writer, working out of a single rented office on Victorian Avenue in Reno — within driving distance of fourteen major Northern Nevada casinos he used for in-person pay-table verification.
The site now runs with a team of seven full-time staff and a network of more than ninety volunteer casino reporters spread across thirty-eight states. It draws roughly 2.1 million unique visitors per year and is trusted by 180,000+ registered trainer accounts, twenty-three percent of whom return within seven days of their last session.
It was awarded "Best Free Strategy Resource" by the American Casino Guide online poll in 2018, 2020, and 2023; cited as a primary source in Stanford's 2019 course "Probability Through Games"; and featured in the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Frugal Gambler companion reading list, as well as four issues of Casino Player Magazine between 2015 and 2023.
The founder's 47-page primer Video Poker Math for the Rest of Us has been downloaded 41,000+ times and is used as prerequisite reading in two community-college gaming courses. The site itself loads in 1.1 seconds on a throttled 4G mobile connection (Lighthouse, Q1 2024) and the trainer installs as a PWA on more than 11,200 reported iOS and Android devices.
There are no promised wins. Video poker is negative EV at most pay tables and we say so plainly on every relevant page. What this site is — and has been, every week since February 2007 — is the place where the math is shown.
The free in-browser trainer is the fastest way to know whether this site is for you. No download, no account required to start, no email gate. Deal a hand, hold the cards you'd hold at the casino, and read the EV. If you want to keep going, the pay tables and casino locator are one click further.
