The concept of Video poker was a major breakthrough into the world of slot machines. Previous advances had been confined to the inner workings of the slot machines, first mechanical and then electronic advances that raised reliability and versatility. They offered little noticeable change other than wider ranges of probabilities and consequently larger but not more frequent jackpots.

Poker-oriented games took advantage of video displays to go beyond the familiar spinning reel. Although video poker is immensely popular, there's a fundamental problem. Solid citizens seek situations where modest wagers can yield major returns. And in video poker, big bucks were not in the cards.

Conventional slots can easily be calibrated so they pay millions of dollars to lucky winners. All that's needed to raise a payout on these machines is to lower the prospect of hitting it.

But video poker is different. The chance of a royal flush in a game with no wild cards, or of a top-ranked result like five-of-a-kind with a joker, can't be specified arbitrarily. For expert play, the odds are around 40,000-to-1. The value is determined by the composition of the deck and the time-honored ranking of poker hands. This and the need for acceptable payouts on other recognized "good" hands, limits jackpots to about 800-for-1, or 4,000 coins out for five in. That's a mere $1,000 for a $1.25 bet. Even progressive video poker hookups rarely exceed 1,000-for-1.

Over the years, the machine moguls have been trying to boost video poker jackpots. They have been testing systems like trimming returns for lesser hands or paying bonuses for "special" royals, such as one designated suit or 10-to-ace in ascending order. None of these approaches ever proved to be successful.

One day someone had a great idea. The video poker makers borrowed this idea from the multi-line nickel slot machines. They produced versions of video poker with proliferations of simultaneous hands. Three, then five, now 50, and you can only guess how many will be next. What actually happens is that all the hands on which a player elects to bet on, start with the same initial five cards. The player then decides which to hold, and this choice again applies to all the hands in action. But each hand is completed independently, as if from its own deck.
Think about playing 50 hands at once, especially when they're all tiny enough to be squeezed onto a single screen. No one is capable of keeping visual track of what's going on and in which hand. But this is exactly what happens on a multi-line reel-type slot. Ordinary human beings can't tell by looking at the screen which horizontal, diagonal, or zigzag lines have won or how much. But who cares, because now the computer is working for you. The computer driving the game highlights the winners, mostly for purposes of excitement, while also displaying the amount returned and the total accumulated credits.
And this is quite enough. The principle works as well on video poker as it does on multi-line slots.
Players don't really want to bother looking at anything as boring as winners and losers. All they want to see is how much they won before rushing on to the next round. The possibility of hitting a big jackpot is the key attraction of slot games. Not just by the summing the wins on individual hands, but by means of bonuses for low-likelihood results such as multiple coincident royals.

The secondary attraction is that a round with enough hands in action almost always produces some sort of win. It may be that a net deficit of 13 hands losing and 2 recovering 1-for-1 on high pairs was a 13-coin loss in second grade arithmetic, but the display will still show 2 units "won" and this will be added to the credit meter. This also helps to explain how you can score on every round but still go broke in the aggregate and lose your bankroll!