A fair reading of "Is video poker random?" 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 costs more without saying so.
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.
Each hand is a separate stake, so ten hands cost ten times one. The swings grow with the number of hands, not the return.
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 full pay machine played with correct strategy returns well over 99 percent, above most slots, because the player's decisions shape the result.