Written by You don’t normally expect to combine a trip to the casino with a visit to the arcade – but 
Video Poker is the one game which combines gambling with video games. The first machines originated in the mid 1970s, not too long after the first video games. Not until the 1980s did Video Poker become popular in casinos as the cost of manufacturing the units dropped.
Customers tend to like them because they avoid the face to face intensity of playing against a real life dealer or other people. The casinos like them because once the machine is bought or leased, it’s a money maker. There’s no dealer to pay and it takes up very little room. One of the first companies to mass manufacture Video Poker was Si Redd’s Coin Machines (SIRCOMA) which eventually became International Game Technology.
The usual game played on Video Poker machines will be Five Card Draw or some variant. From a software development point of view it’s a relatively easy game to develop – there’s just one deck of cards used and the rules of Five Card Draw won’t demand to much processing power. Of course these factors do not matter anymore but Five Card Draw still remains the Video Poker game of choice.
Briefly, you place your bet (after inserting your coins or tokens) and then you are dealt five cards, your aim being to obtain the best five card hand according to standard Draw Poker rankings. At this point you get the opportunity to swap any cards in your hand with new ones from the unused deck. What you end up with here is your final hand and you win according to the table below.
Similar to slot machines, there are regulations governing the standards and payout levels of Video Poker machines. These are to ensure for example that random number generators are indeed random. An interesting quirk that differs Video Poker from slot machines is that payout levels can occasionally be more than 100%. As unlikely as this sounds, if you play Video Poker using optimum decisions (and you need to be experienced to do this), you can sometimes expect a payout level of just over 100%.
