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Slot machines have been around since the 1890s. In 1891 a company in New York City developed a 5-drum poker machine that would deal a hand of poker. The prizes had to delivered by the establishment, mostly beer parlours, as there was no automatic payout device, but the prizes, everything from a free beer to a box of cigars proved extremely popular. A few years later, Charles Fey, developed a 3-ring, automatic payout slot machine. The game used symbols such as horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts, and a Liberty Bell. The grand prize was getting three liberty bells across the board, which paid off 50 cents. Today there are nearly 1.4 slot machines in existence, and some, the mega progressive machines, payoff millions. It is reported that in 2003, an anonymous software engineer playing the Megabucks progressive in Las Vegas won $39 million dollars on a single pull of the machine. Now that progressives are common at most online casinos as well, someone typically wins at least $1 million or more on progressive slot machines every 30 days or so.

So what are the most common slot machine types?

Up until 1987, virtually all slot machines were single coin machines. You put in a coin of the denomination as low as 1 cent to as high as $1 and pulled the slot handle. It should be noted that early machines used mechanical applications of random number generators. True modern slot machines which today are operated by sophisticated, computerized random number generators that create a different random number every fraction of a second did not develop until the late 1980s.

Multi-coin Slots

In 1987, Bally came out with the first multiplayer game, a giant evolution for casino profits, if not for casino slot players. A player could be offered to gamble two, three, or even 5 coins at a time and as encouragement for doing so, the house would offer larger jackpots only available if you played multi-coins. Since the house always had an edge (anywhere from 21 down to around 3 per cent depending on location and the denomination of play) this means that casinos could rake in millions more in gambling profits.

Coinless Slots

Somewhere around 2001 or so, slot machine manufacturers began to develop the ability to use coinless slot machines. Instead, one inserted dollar bills into the machine, and that amount registered on computers within the machine. Let’s say that a player had a $35 account balance and decides to call it a night, or use a different slot machine. A printer prints out a paper print out where you can stick into another machine for $35 worth of credits, or alternatively, cash out. To cash out you take the printed voucher to the cashier’s cage. Coinless slots solved two problems at once. No ceaseless loading of coins into slot machines, which saved a lot of labour, but more importantly it made it easier for slot machine manufacturers (and thus the casinos) to load up with truly multi-player games. Whereas the early multi-player games allowed to up to 5 coins, now betting on 20, 30, and 40 pay lines at a time are routine. This means that people gamble a whole lot more money on slot machines at a time, and naturally, the casinos rake this money in. Slot machines that require you to play so many lines to win a prize are known as “buy your pay machines,” and can be quite frustrating if you hit a jackpot only to discover you don’t qualify for the higher jackpots because you didn’t play enough credits.

Wildcard Slots

Wildcard slots are perhaps the most fun and represent the new generation of slot machines. While they still take plenty of your money by offering 20, 30, even 50 pay lines at a time, wildcard slots present different bonuses that add up to substantial money and keep players going longer and longer. Wildcard slots sometimes offer from 7 to 15 free games, and when you hit, the experience can be exhilarating. Alternatively, video slots offer a slower game with generally no huge jackpots, but often a much greater chance to win a small amount of money. Mind you, when we say video slots, we are talking about games that imitate playing games like video poker and the like, not slot machines with a video game feel. There is another game machine found only at brick and mortar casinos and they are called Big Bertha’s. These are overly large slot machines often found at the entranceway to a casino to initiate slot excitement. Some casinos will give you a single pull on a Big Bertha Machine for free, some having a bullet-proof plexiglass cage call at you for $100,000 or more. Others will be for pay and for some weird psychological reason, some people take great comfort at playing Big Bertha machines even though the payout is often worse than other machines. Finally, there are multi-game machines. Video poker games, for example, may give you a choice of half a dozen different games to play on the same machine.

Poker is one of the main staples of a casino, it is “the” game when you think of a casino, and it is even shown the most when it comes to movies. With all that said, most people don’t even know that there are different types of poker games that you can play. I will be going over a lot of them in this article, how they are played, what deck that you play them with, how many players to play with, and even when some of them were created. Poker in some form has been around since the early 1900s, and over the years many different ways to play it have cropped up. A fun fact about poker is that it originated in the United States of America, and plus the world series of poker was also started in the United States in the 1970s as well. All of these different game types still share the core aspects of poker that make them all poker games.

Texas Hold’em

Texas Hold’em is by far the most popular form of poker that there is, it is played by 2 to 10 people with a 52 card deck. The game starts with the dealer dealing out two face-down cards to every player (these cards are called hole cards). Once all the players have their hole cards, there are then 5 cards that get dealt to the center (these are called community cards) and they are dealt in 3 separate stages.

The first stage (which is called the flop) has the dealer placing the first 3 cards face up, the second stage has the dealer placing one more card face up (this stage is referred to as the turn or just as commonly know as fourth street, then the last stage has the dealer placing the final community card face up (this stage is called the river or is just a commonly called fifth street).

The objective of the game is to make the best 5 card hand using any combination of the 7 cards at their disposal. Then there are betting rounds which take place every stage after the flop, each player has multiple options that they could do which include the player’s choice to check, call, raise, or fold. The player with the best hand that hasn’t folded then wins, they also collect whatever was bet. Its name actually comes from its birthplace, and it is seen as one of the very first forms of poker.

Omaha hold ’em

Omaha hold ’em is another version of poker that is played with a 52 card deck, it is similar to Texas Hold’em but with some key differences. While it is not as popular as Texas Hold’em, it does still have a massive cult following, starting all the way back when poker was first created. It has all the same rules as Texas Hold’em but with the major change up being that you have to use both of your hole cards to make your 5 card hand. There are some other difference that are mostly based in the scoring system, but the “Omaha” aspect of the game (there are many derivatives of Omaha hold ’em, but they all use the 2 hole card rule) is what really sets it apart from its poker cousins.

7-Card Stud

7-Card Stud is another version of poker that was at one point more popular than Texas Hold ’em, but this lead was short-lived. This variation started around the same time as Texas Hold ’em and is also played with a 52 card deck and 2 to 8 players.

Its objective is the same as the other poker games on this list, which is to make the best 5 card hand possible. The way that this game does that though is very different, the game starts with three cards being dealt to every player, and these cards are dealt with 2 cards face down and one final card dealt face up so that the rest of the table can see it. After the initial deal there is then betting rounds between every subsequent dealing, the players will now have three more face up cards and one last card dealt face down (there will be betting rounds between all of these cards being dealt). Then all the players enter the showdown phase of the game, in this phase of the game all the players turn their hole cards face up and make the best 5 card hand that they can (they have to discard the 2 cards that they don’t use). The person with the best hand at the end of the game wins.

Razz

Razz is a variant of stud poker, and is actually one of the oldest forms of poker, also this form of poker was one of the first to start using the 52 card deck over the original 20 card setup used for poker. Razz has actually also been an event in the World Series of Poker ever since 1971, and is actually the third most popular form of lowball poker behind Texas hold ’em and Omaha hold ’em.

The objective of this game is very different from the others on this list, its objective is to have the lowest possible 5 card hand. The rules are similar to other 7-card games but with the task to have the lowest hand of your competitors. The game starts with the dealer dealing two hole cards to every player, and then they deal one face up card to every player (this card is called the door card). Then the game is dealt is the exact same way as 7 card stud, so I won’t go over it in dealt as I have already done so for 7 card studs entry. The betting phase is also identical to 7 card stud except for the fact that the lowest hand starts betting rather first than the highest hand.

In conclusion

In conclusion, there are many more types of poker than you could have ever imagined and many of them have very unique play styles. A lot of these are derivatives of each other, but if you want some more unique ones then that means you should look at a game like Badugi. Badugi is a poker game that was created in the 1980s so it is one of the newer game types by far, and this does make it one of the least played, but it is also one of the more unique and complicated ones if you want to check it out.