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Video Poker is a Slot Machine Variant
The first slot machines to be created were actually built of drums with fifty faces corresponding to fifty of the fifty two cards in a deck. The game was played by inserting a coin into the machine and shortly after the machine was invented, practically every bar in New York had at least one. The game was played as poker, a sort of one shot poker. This then could truly be said to be the precursor of today's modern and exciting video poker. The video poker of today has become so popular that you cannot fail to notice, upon entering any casino, a row of several video poker machines.
Improvements to Video Poker Games
Of course, modern times have brought several modern improvements to video poker games. The first improvement has been the payout. The original slot machines described in the previous paragraph were mechanical contraptions. Thus, allowing the machine to award different awards for every possible winning combination proved to be too complex. The result of this difficulty was that it was the job of the bar owner to select the reward and there was no standardization of payouts and returns. Another improvement was that while the original slot games had only 50 faces on their drums (the jack of heart and the ten of spades were left out) Today's video poker games include the entire deck in a completely random fashion. In addition, today's video poker games simulate real poker in that the player gets to redraw cards just like in a real card game. Finally an incredible amount of variants were introduced with all sorts of rules and payout tables to accommodate them. In addition, many machines offer the player the opportunity to play several video poker games at once as a sort of multi-line video poker.
Video Poker Developments
The video poker gamesas we know them today first saw light in the early 1980s. The original randomization was supposed to completely simulate a fifty two card deck (in accordance with Nevada State laws). Originally, all ten cards were randomly drawn at once. This proved to be a programming mistake as players soon discovered that they could get a hint at the remaining five cards because computerized random number generators have certain limitations. Today's video poker machines generally randomly select the first five numbers and select the next numbers only after the player chooses which cards to re-deal.
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