Video Poker is a current mixture of typical five-card draw Poker and hi-tech Slots technology, yet its ancestry can almost certainly be traced back to the early 1890s. History records that the Sittman & Pitt company of New York created a mechanical gambling machine, similar to a traditional one-armed bandit that used five reels to randomly produce Poker hands. Even though the machines did not directly payout prizes, the bars where the machines became wildly popular would have their own payout scheme of rewards for different hand values, such as a free beer for a high-value pair.

At the same time as the typical of Video Poker can find its origins in those late 19 th Century gaming machines, it wasn't until the flares-and-Disco-era of the mid 1970s that computer technology became adequately cheap to spawn the first true Video Poker consoles in a form that we'd recognize today. Although primitive by current standards, early commercial machines such as International Game Technology's 'Draw Poker' released in 1979, showed the way and helped establish Video Poker as a new attraction at casinos, proving popular with gamers who found the traditional table games a bit daunting.

Nowadays, Video Poker has recognized itself as a solid favourite on the gaming floors of many real-world casinos. In addition its screen-driven boundary has also made it extraordinarily well-suited to the online environment, and myriads of games can now be enjoyed at hundreds of online casinos, where Video Poker's relative cleanness (and the lure of some very substantial progressive jackpots) has won it an excited following in the middle of the Web's gaming community.

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