Bonus Poker 8/5: rules, payouts & strategy

Standard draw poker with three quad awards

Bonus Poker uses 52 cards and no wild cards. Five cards are dealt; you keep zero to five and replace the rest once. The replacement cards come from the 47 not in the initial hand. The final hand receives the single highest applicable award. Low pairs pay nothing; a pair of jacks or better returns the stake.

The 8/5 label means a full house pays eight and a flush five per coin. This page uses the standard schedule with four aces paying 80, four twos through fours paying 40, and other quads paying 25 times the total stake. Check all awards: games with similar names or altered quad payouts are not interchangeable.

Our simulator represents final-hand frequencies under optimal strategy. It does not offer a deal/hold game or coach your decisions. The card pictures illustrate categories and are not a record of an actual draw.

All payouts at five coins

A payout includes the original wager. A high pair returns five credits and breaks even; two pair returns ten, for five credits of profit. With $1 credits, each hand costs $5 and four aces return $400. With $0.25 credits, the same hand costs $1.25 and returns $100. The ratio is unchanged.

The royal award here is 4,000 credits on a five-credit bet. Common machines pay a smaller proportional royal below five coins; the theoretical return here therefore assumes maximum coins on every hand. Lowering the denomination is a way to reduce dollars per hand while preserving the five-coin schedule.

The rank matters; the kicker does not

The fifth card in a quad hand is called the kicker. A low kicker adds no bonus in this game. Four aces with a two and four aces with a king both pay 400 credits at five coins. Holding the quad guarantees that award; changing the kicker cannot increase it.

This differs from Double Double Bonus 9/6, where both the quad rank and kicker affect the award. It also differs from Bonus Poker Deluxe, which uses another payout structure. Use the exact game name and complete schedule when choosing a strategy reference.

Protect paying hands without ignoring valuable draws

Choose the hold with the greatest expected gross payout across its possible draws. That is a different question from which hold feels safest or which hand you hope to make. Bonus awards make some ace and low-pair decisions more valuable, but they do not justify chasing quads from every paying hand.

Two pair still has real value

Unlike Double Double Bonus, two pair pays twice the stake. Keeping both pairs retains that return and leaves four cards that can improve to a full house. Do not automatically break two pair to chase a bonus quad. Detailed strategy charts handle the close comparisons; the two-pair award is a central reason the games need different priorities.

Keep this full house

For A♠ A♥ A♦ K♣ K♦, keep all five for eight times the wager. Keeping only the three aces and drawing two returns about 6.5865 times on average: the 1,081 draws contain 46 ace quads, 67 full houses and 968 three-of-a-kind results. The bonus for aces is not large enough to offset giving up the full house.

The same exact cards favor drawing to the three aces in 9/6 Double Double Bonus because its ace and kicker awards are much larger. This is why copying a hold from a similarly named game can cost expected value.

What 99.1660% means for your bankroll

The exact published counts give 99.1659732% theoretical RTP, or approximately 0.8340% house edge, for this schedule with optimal play and five coins. On $1,000 wagered in total, the expected loss is about $8.34. That amount is an average over possible outcomes, not a fee or a forecast for a particular session.

Turnover is the sum of all wagers, not just your opening balance. At $1 per credit, 100 five-coin hands generate $500 of turnover if your balance can fund them all. The expected loss on that fixed volume is about $4.17, but actual wins and losses can be much larger.

The per-hand return variance is approximately 20.9041 in squared wager units, compared with about 41.9850 for 9/6 Double Double Bonus. Bonus Poker has smaller swings by that measure; it is not low risk or guaranteed to preserve a bankroll. Rare royal flushes still contribute meaningfully to the average, and many sessions contain none.

Speed changes only how fast the simulator produces outcomes. Denomination scales dollars without changing RTP. More hands increase the chance of seeing uncommon categories, but do not remove uncertainty or promise recovery from losses. A session ends when its hand limit is reached or the bankroll cannot cover another full five-coin wager.

Questions readers ask

Sources & calculation notes