History Of Video Poker
www.USAPlayers.com Video Poker History of Video Poker
It is all good and well to know which video poker casinos offer the best online video poker, where you get the best video poker casino bonuses and the best way to play every possible video poker hand – but this is all incomplete without knowing your video poker history.
Due to the fact that video poker is a mixture of slots and 5 card poker, the game’s history goes back to 1891 to the development of the very first slot machine. This game used 50 card symbols, spread across 5 drums (10 on each). With only place for 50 cards this meant that two cards had to be sacrificed – the Jack and Ten of Spades. This is the first time that a house edge was so blatantly introduced as the chances of a player getting a High Straight being reduced.
Just a few years after the introduction of the first slot machine, the Liberty Bell was unveiled by Charles Frey. This is where video poker history took another turn. This machine moved away from the poker symbols and changed to bells, horseshoes, hearts and spades. Players had to land these symbols in a sequence of a row in order to be eligible for a prize.
The road to video poker became quiet for a few decades until 1970 when Dale Electronics unleashed its Poker-Matic video poker machine. Although even the critics expected this new wonder machine to take the gambling world by storm, this was not the case at all. The game only rose in popularity 5 years later when casino guru Walt Fraley introduced the video poker machines to the Las Vegas floors. However, many players did not trust the payouts as there was no human interaction with the machines and therefore preferred playing against a live dealer who they could watch. Trusted video poker online casinos came later.
From the 1980s, as more and more things started to be computerised, gamblers became more and more trusting of these video poker machines. More land based casinos started to adopt these machines as a crowd puller and before long these machines were a common sight in even the most obscure casinos.
In 1994, Microgaming developed the world’s first ever online casino in video poker history. This was a great outlet for computerised land based USA casinos games as there was now a stage to contact millions of new gamblers. As the popularity of online casinos grew, software and games development companies fought to release the best games in order to draw in more customers and to keep a hold on the market. Video poker was always going to be a huge player in the market due to its simplicity and quick game play.
Today, online casinos have video poker as a standard and even though video poker history may seem a little rocky, there are only great things on the horizon for the game and the game features of video poker. The rules of video poker down to playing have pretty much stayed the same and only the unique graphics continue to improve. With scores of new versions of the games having been released in the last decade, there is no stopping this game’s rise.
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