Slots vs. Video Poker

17 March 2022

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: Neither one of us is an inveterate slots player.

ABBY: Or video-poker player.

CINDY: I say we are basically samplers of these games.

ABBY: But we do play them every time we go to the casinos.

CINDY: For sure.

ABBY: Just from a casual observation, slots dominate the machine world. It isn’t even close. There is a decent number of video-poker players but they are a small minority of the machine players. I also think most of the video-poker players are men and that women have a small majority of the slot players. These are my casual observations.

CINDY: Both video poker and slots have a single reference point.

ABBY: Which is?

CINDY: The players get used to losing during most sessions. It’s almost as if they are trained to expect long losing streaks. For slots players a decent hit now and again can get them back into the game. They have no real idea of what the machine holds and gives out. There are ways to speculate as to which machines are looser than other machines but we have no concrete facts to back any of our suppositions up.

ABBY: With video poker, players have to hit those premium hands or they are going to slowly or even more quickly go down. The players do know this…

CINDY: Mostly.

ABBY: And players can look up on the Internet and on this site how machines behave; what they return and the like. You can get the best strategies of how to play your hands too. That is not true of slot machines.

CINDY: If you are a quarter slot player, the house edge can be about 10 percent. Very few, if any, video-poker machines keep a percentage that high.

ABBY: Other than which slot machine to pick and how fast or slow to play that machine, you really have no decisions to make. Video-poker is not like that at all. You can know the exact house edge on the machine you want to play as long as you use the correct strategies for the play of your hands.

CINDY: Slot players do have one major thing over video-poker players. They get better comps! Much better. Yes, I am being somewhat sarcastic here because whatever comps a player gets is based on their theoretical loss and the slot machines have that down precisely for each machine and each denomination of that machine.

ABBY: Video poker players get maybe half or maybe even less than half of the slot-machine comps because those games are more player favorable.

CINDY: Which ones should you play then? I think video poker is the better game. You at least have some impact based on your strategy of playing your hands. Slots? You just sit and watch and have no impact on the game.

ABBY: I go a little here and a little there. I will play slots at the end of a session at table games. Sometimes I will do the same thing with video poker. These are “I am done today (or tonight). A couple of plays here and off to do something else or go to sleep. You know this, right?

CINDY: Yes.