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Break-even or nearly break-even video poker is no secret or holy grail -- every hand is dealt from a fresh deck, there's only one real "play", and the payoffs are known. It is well within the abilities of a sharp computer programmer to hammer out a program that can tell you the optimal strategy for any given situation, and to further determine what the payoff would be for so-called "long-term" (millions of hands -- more than you would play in a lifetime) play.

The casinos fiddle with blackjack by jiggling the rules, number of decks, and so on. It's easy enough to jiggle video poker simply by varying the pay scale posted on the machine (as you mentioned), as well as coming up with exotic games such as the one where each card is dealt from its own deck, et al.

Banning video poker players is just stupid. A video poker is helplessly at the whim of "the law of large numbers" -- the only big payoff, a Royal Flush, comes up (or is built) roughly once in 40,000 hands -- roughly 100 hours of video poker play if you can bang out a hand every nine seconds), and there's nothing he can do about it. And at that point, it's more than likely that the big payoff just gets him back to even anyway.

You don't need to be a computer programmer to know how to do well on video poker, it's real simple. Just have to remember there's no bluffing, you're just playing odds and trying to maximize your hand with the draw portion. If your hand has "something" dump everthing but that something and the highest "junk" card. If your hand has nothing dump everything but your highest two junk cards. This stragey will clean up with almost any video/ computer poker, and will empty your wallet playing against people.

It's quite possible -- even likely -- that the hands dealt in video poker are not random. If they are generated by software algorithm rather than being the result of some high order random number generator based on something like radioactive decay -- then someone could learn their pattern and have a consistent edge. They might even have access to the program.

Inciteful commentary. You are right, the near-breakeven odds (and some cases player-favored odds) are calculated with the royal flush in mind, you need to hit it to stay in business, otherwise you're losing fairly modestly even playing correct strategy until you do. I think the issue in question are certain progessive jackpot machines that tilt the odds in the player's favor once the jackpot reaches a certain level, but you still have to hit it to get a payoff.

You can imagine there are plenty of other folks with no lives who have nothing better to do but be at the casino 24/7 looking for such situations, who will be lining up to get that royal for themselves. Its not worth it, IMO, unless you are playing for the comps, free rooms at a minimum...if that's your thing.