Video Poker

Video poker is an electronic machine game in which you are dealt a five-card poker hand, choose which cards to keep, draw replacements, and are paid from a fixed table according to the final hand's poker ranking.

Definition

It runs on a random number generator that shuffles a standard 52-card deck, so like a reel slot it is a solitary, house-banked machine game with no other players to beat. Unlike a slot, though, the paytable is fully published and the player's hold-and-draw decisions change the return, giving video poker a genuine skill element and a computable optimal strategy. And unlike live or peer-to-peer poker there is no opponent, no shared pot and no bluffing — you are simply paid for making qualifying hands, such as a pair of jacks or higher. Across the trade it is treated as its own game category, even though on the floor and in the maths it sits inside the electronic gaming machine family.

Worked example

Take a hypothetical "Jacks or Better" machine that pays 9 coins for a full house and 6 for a flush (a 9/6 paytable). Dealt from a fair 52-card RNG and played with perfect hold decisions, that table returns about 99.5% over the long run, so a £1-a-hand player who wagers £10,000 across a session would expect to lose only around £50. Trim the full house to 8 coins and the flush to 5, and the return falls to roughly 97.3% — turning that same £10,000 of play into an expected £270 loss. The edge is set by the paytable, not by luck.

Why it matters

Because video poker's return is a mathematical property of its published paytable, it is one of the few machine games whose advertised RTP a regulator, journalist or player can verify by inspection rather than by trusting a hidden reel configuration. That transparency, together with the skill element, makes it a useful reference point when explaining how much of a slot's return is deliberately kept out of view. Operationally it also behaves unlike slots — lower hold and sharper players — which is why operators often report it as its own performance segment.

Further reading

Authoritative references for slots — regulators, standards bodies and primary sources. Independent, not affiliated.

• Wizard of Odds — Slot Machineswizardofodds.com
• UK Gambling Commission — Remote gambling and software technical standards (RTS)gamblingcommission.gov.uk
• Gaming Laboratories International (GLI) — GLI Standardsgaminglabs.com

Note: For licensing and financial reporting, regulators and operators usually classify video poker under electronic gaming machines or slots, yet the trade routinely discusses it as a distinct category; which label you see depends on whether the context is legal, financial or product.