There are many casino gambling games based on poker which are not "true poker". The key identifying characteristics of these games are:
- They use poker hand rankings, and sometimes other aspects of familiar poker games (e.g. a flop) as an important component of their game
- They do not involve players competing against each other or winning money from each other; instead, a player gambles to win money from the house. Accordingly:
- It is possible for these games to be played with only one player
Unlike true poker, the way the casino makes money on these games is by always having a statistical advantage built into the rules. The player is always at a staistical disadvantage, and over the long run will always lose money to the house. The size of this casino advantage, called the house edge, varies from game to game. Occasionally, casinos may even offer versions of these games with no house edge, either as promotional tactics or because their own internal numbers show a profit can be made even without an edge. A known form of this is versions of video poker which have no house edge, or even a slight advantage for the player.
Up until the mid-90's, the only poker-derived game commonly found in casinos was video poker. Caribbean Stud then began to appear, slowly filtering into cruise ship casinos and out into Las Vegas.
The explosion in poker's popularity that came with the poker boom in 2003 has led to the rapid development of a number of casino poker-based games, probably to attract casual poker television viewers. Many of these games have also been offered with multiple slight variations (e.g. Let It Ride and Let It Ride Bonus), and a casino may usually choose to offer any or all of them. Most of these games are patented by game-development corporations like Shufflemaster and are merely licensed for use in particular casinos, who pay the game-development corporation an annual fee for the right to continue to offer their game.
Currently available for casinos to offer are the following poker-derived casino games:
- Video poker (including all variants; see article for more details)
- Three Card Poker
- Four Card Poker
- Caribbean Stud
- Mississippi Stud
- Let It Ride
- Ultimate Texas Hold'em
- Texas Hold 'Em Bonus
- Crazy 4 Poker
