Video poker won't be eliminated, but the version most players remember is already gone.
Casino operators are cutting machine counts and tightening pay tables, and the games that remain return less than they used to. The format survives as long as enough players keep sitting down at it, even at worse odds.
Readers here know I'm a long-standing fan of the game. I've put years into learning how to extract everything a pay table will give up. In the glory days, most video poker games approached a 100 percent return, and a few crossed it with correct play. Those days are over. The question now is how much further the decline runs, and whether it ends with the machines gone altogether.
Where Does Video Poker Stand Today?
Video poker is still popular, and even in its diminished state it generally carries a lower house edge than the other machine games sitting on either side of it. That's most of the appeal, though not all of it.
Players who stay with the format tend to give the same reasons:
- A lower house edge than slots and most other machine-based games.
- A say in the outcome, because the hold decision belongs to the player and not the machine.
- Something to think about on every hand, instead of the bet-and-spin, bet-and-spin routine of trying to win at slots.
- A calculable return. The pay table on the screen tells you the house edge of that exact game, which is never true of a slot machine.
None of that guarantees that a machine will keep its place on the floor.
Why Are Casinos Downgrading Pay Tables?
The floor mix is decided by profit contribution, not by popularity.
Casinos today are run by publicly traded corporations, and public ownership brings shareholders who want better numbers every quarter. The operators of an earlier era understood what brought gamblers back.
They welcomed the occasional big winner and treated the payout as publicity, knowing the winner would return to chase the next one and bring family and friends along, most of whom played games with a far bigger edge.
Video poker was a loss leader, though in nearly every case the house still held an edge. The real money came from the people who arrived with the skilled players.
Intangibles like that don't fit neatly into a quarterly report. What matters is the contribution each machine makes to the bottom line, so pay tables get tightened on underperforming games. If play then falls away on the downgraded machines, those machines become candidates for removal in favor of slots that earn more per square foot.
Video poker isn't the only part of the floor under review. Table games get the same audit. A blackjack table paying 6:5 on a natural instead of 3:2 does to blackjack strategy exactly what a downgraded pay table does to video poker: the game looks identical and returns less. Some table games have been changed. Others have been removed outright.
The Las Vegas Strip is the clearest example. Strip casinos have cut both the number of video poker machines and the quality of the pay tables on the ones that remain. The space has gone to very large, visually loud slot cabinets, and in some rooms to "skill-based" machines aimed at younger players and their discretionary funds.
What Could Happen to Video Poker Next?
Three outcomes are already visible in different casinos, sometimes in the same city.
The first is what almost every operator has done to some degree. Downgrade the pay tables, then hope play holds up at the higher margin. Where play drops instead, some casinos ease the tables back up to see whether the lost players return. A few restore them to their old levels.
The second is status quo by design. Some management teams know video poker players rarely arrive alone, and that the people who come with them head straight for the slots. Those casinos leave the floor as is, and video poker with a decent return remains available.
The third is elimination. A casino that judges a bank of machines to be underperforming, whether because the pay tables are too generous for its taste or because a downgrade drove the players off, pulls them. The space then goes to slots, to another higher-edge game, or to skill-based cabinets. In a handful of rooms, it has simply been left empty.
Does the Same Pressure Apply Online?
Not in the same form. The squeeze on a land-based floor is fundamentally a space problem. Every cabinet occupies square footage that must justify its presence against whatever could stand there instead.
Online, that constraint doesn't exist. A video poker title in a lobby takes up no floor space and displaces nothing, so there's no equivalent reason to retire it for underperforming.
What carries over is the pay table. Online video poker runs on published pay tables in the same way, and the return varies between variants and between different versions of the same variant. The paytable screen still tells you the house edge of the game in front of you before you commit a coin.
Checking it is the habit that separates players who know what they're playing from players who don't, and it matters as much in a lobby as it does on a casino floor.
What Is the Most Likely Outcome?
Video poker survives, in smaller numbers and at lower returns than it once offered.
Most operators do understand that video poker players contribute more than the machine's own hold figure shows. Others frequently come with them and play games that earn the casino far more.
Both groups eat at the restaurants, buy from the gift shops, and sometimes book rooms. That revenue doesn't appear in the machine's report, but it exists.
Expect pay tables on gaming machines to keep moving, and the rules and payoffs on some table games to keep moving with them, always in the direction of a better bottom line.
Demand for video poker remains healthy. There's a standing crowd of committed players who will sit down at unfavorable pay tables, and a large share of them have no idea what the game they're playing actually returns. What they know is that choosing which cards to hold is more interesting than pressing a button and hoping.
That's the part that keeps the format alive. Enough players will play whatever video poker is put in front of them, so video poker stays. Serious players may want no part of what's left.
Key Takeaways
- Video poker generally carries a lower house edge than other machine games, which is why it holds its following.
- Corporate casino ownership judges the floor by profit contribution, so pay tables get tightened on underperforming games.
- Machines that lose play after a downgrade become candidates for removal, usually in favor of slots or skill-based cabinets.
- Online, floor space isn't a constraint, so the pressure to pull titles doesn't apply in the same way. The pay table still does.
- Complete elimination is unlikely. As long as players keep playing whatever is available, video poker survives in some form.
