A fair reading of "Are slots rigged?" comes from the pay table. Video poker sits between slots and table poker. A machine deals five cards, the player chooses which to hold, and a pay table fixed on the screen says what every final hand is worth. Because the player makes real decisions and the pay table is public, video poker is one of the few casino games where the odds can be read before a coin goes in.
Each variant changes the pay table and the strategy. Jokers wild adds a joker that counts as any card, and deuces games make every two wild, with loose deuces paying extra for four of them. Bonus poker pays more for certain four of a kind hands, and quick quads adds a side wager on them. Multi hand video poker, common online, plays one hold across several hands at once, raising the stake per deal. Plain jacks or better has the lowest variance of the usual games.
Video poker can be beaten only in narrow cases. On a few full pay machines, perfect strategy combined with cash back or comps can push the return above one hundred percent, which is what advantage play means here. Almost everywhere else the game is not profitable over time. Casinos control which pay table a machine carries, not which cards it deals: regulated machines draw from a random shuffle, so they are not rigged, but a weaker pay table quietly costs more.
Only on rare full pay machines with correct strategy and extra rewards on top. On an ordinary pay table the edge stays with the house.
Autoplay makes the holds for you and hides each decision, and on some games it does not play the best strategy. Manual play keeps the choices in view.
A regulated machine shuffles a virtual deck at random for each deal, and its cards cannot know what the player holds. The pay table sets the return.
Strategy charts, analyzers and calculators show the best hold for every hand of a given pay table. They cut mistakes; they cannot change the pay table.
It lists what each hand returns for the stake, and small changes matter: a machine paying 9 for a full house and 6 for a flush returns more than one paying 8 and 5.