yeah but I wonder about some of these video poker games. There are so many weird variations and double up opportunities it may just be that someone has found a winning strategy. After all who designs these games? It took 50 years to get blackjack "safe" for casinos and they had to do things like go to six decks to make it so.
Funny, I would tend to avoid those things like the plague for exactly the opposite reason - on the blackjack table, you have some assurance that everything's on the level. As for the video poker...well, who the hell knows what's going on inside those things? They sure as heck aren't going to open up the code for me to take a look at it, and I'm sure as heck not going to plop any money into those things on the theory that casino operators are nice, trustworthy guys ;)
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.