All American Poker at Springbok: where a straight pays like a full house

One hand, one draw. After choosing a coin from R0.05 to R5.00 and up to 5 coins, you are dealt five cards, hold any you like, and the others are replaced once. The final five are paid against the table. There are no wild cards, and the smallest paying hand is a pair of Jacks, Queens, Kings or aces. Lobby reading · 9 Oct 2026 (opens the source)

What sets the game apart is not the rules but the way the pay table spreads its money. Most Jacks-based tables climb in steady steps from straight to flush to full house. This one puts all three on the same rung, lifts the straight flush far above where Jacks or Better keeps it, and pays for that partly by trimming two pair to the same award as a single high pair.

Wins can go into the Double or Nothing round, a one-card contest against the dealer's card: higher doubles the win, lower loses it. It sits outside the pay table and changes nothing about the hand itself.

Holding well only trims the house edge on each hand; it does not make the game pay over time. No published hold chart we found is built for this table, and Jacks or Better charts assume straights and flushes pay much less than they do here. Counting every possible draw against Springbok's rows points to these changes from the Jacks or Better order:

• Four to a flush beats a high pair. With four cards of one suit and a pair of Jacks or better split across the hand, draw to the flush. A Jacks or Better chart says the opposite.
• Four to an open-ended straight edges out a high pair too. Take a pair of Jacks with 8, 9 and 10: keeping one Jack with the 8, 9 and 10 comes out slightly ahead of keeping the pair. The margin is small, but it points the same way.
• A low pair loses to four to an open-ended straight. In Jacks or Better the pair comes first; here the straight draw is clearly ahead.
• Two pair: keep both pairs. The made hand pays only 1, but the one-card draw can fill a full house worth 8, and that beats keeping a single high pair.
• Four to a straight flush already outranks a high pair on a Jacks or Better chart, and it gains more here: completing it pays 200 per coin, and many of the misses still land a straight or a flush.
• Three of a kind: keep the three and draw two. Four of a kind pays 30 per coin.
• Four to a royal hidden in a made flush: the answer turns on your coins. With all 5 coins in, the royal pays 4,000 coins and breaking the flush to draw at it comes out ahead. At 1 coin the royal pays only 250, and keeping the flush is usually the better hold. Straights pay the same as flushes here, so a made straight hiding four royal cards follows the same rule. The one exception at 1 coin is a 10, Jack, Queen and King of one suit: a 9 at the bottom end also completes a straight flush, and that extra out tips the count towards breaking the made hand.

A worked deal

Say the deal is the Jack of hearts, Jack of diamonds, 9, 5 and 3 of hearts. Habit from Jacks or Better says keep the Jacks. On this table the four hearts are the better hold: nine hearts remain among the 47 unseen cards, any one of them makes a flush worth 8 per coin, and two of the other cards are Jacks that still pair the Jack you kept. The pair of Jacks, by contrast, mostly ends the hand as a pair, which pays back only the stake.

The rest of the Jacks or Better order, from pat hands down to single high cards, is laid out step by step in the strategy basics guide.