Video Poker has been sitting in Orbital Gaming’s catalogue since late 2023, and it’s still one of the few card-format titles from a studio that made its name on crash games and Provably Fair arcade mechanics. That’s the first thing worth flagging: Orbital didn’t build this as a classic five-card draw machine. According to SlotCatalog, the game’s own listed objective is beating the dealer’s hand, not holding and discarding your way to a pair of Jacks. The RTP sits at 99% — a full point above the 96–97% you’ll find on most video slots, and close to what skilled Jacks or Better players chase manually. The catch: there’s no skill element here to chase. Whether that trade-off works depends entirely on what kind of card game you actually want.
Who actually made this
Orbital Gaming is a Tbilisi, Georgia-based studio founded in 2019, and it’s strictly B2B — you won’t find a direct-to-player Orbital website taking your deposit. Its output leans heavily on Provably Fair mechanics, and its stated focus is <cite index=”10-1″>crash and video slot genres</cite>, which makes a card-comparison title like this one something of a side note in the catalogue rather than a flagship release. The studio has partnered with distribution platforms including GrooveGaming and Reevo, which is how a game like this ends up on smaller or newer casino brands rather than the household names. That distribution profile matters for a practical reason: it explains why availability is patchy, and why a 2026 player is more likely to find this game bundled into a fresh iGaming platform’s launch catalogue than sitting on a long-established brand’s front page.
The wider Orbital catalogue is a mixed bag of arcade and card content — Miami 1980, Orbital Keno, Orbital HiLo, Orbital Mines, Orbital Plinko, Orbital Astro, Orbital Spheres, Baccarat, and Casino Hold’em all sit alongside Video Poker under the same provider banner. Casino Guru’s count puts the studio’s card-and-instant-game catalogue at 14 titles, split across video poker, keno, dice, crash, and other categories. Video Poker isn’t a one-off experiment, in other words — it’s part of a small but consistent card-games line the studio has kept building since 2019.
RTP, format, and the conflict nobody’s resolved
Start with the number that matters most: 99% RTP, confirmed via SlotCatalog, the highest-trust aggregator for this data. That’s the figure I’m treating as authoritative. It’s not operator-configurable in any published source I found — no range, no “up to,” just a flat 99%.
Here’s where it gets messy. A second aggregator (Online-Slots) lists this same game at 99.50% RTP with a 4000x max win, a 5×3 grid, a single payline, and Wild Symbols. SlotCatalog’s own attribute table shows no betways, no listed features, and a max win of x1000 — four times lower. A third source, Slots Paradise, goes further and states Orbital Gaming has never published exact RTP or variance figures for this game at all, and describes the format as a traditional hold-and-discard game where a pair of Jacks or better is needed to win.
Three sources, three different pictures. I’m not going to pretend that’s resolved. What I can tell you: SlotCatalog’s description is the one that’s consistent across its own review copy, published twice — the goal is <cite index=”26-1,39-1″>achieving a superior hand compared to the dealer</cite>, framed explicitly as a refresh of Texas Hold’em rather than a Jacks-or-Better derivative. That’s a fundamentally different game shape than “hold four cards to a royal flush draw.” One has no player decision after the deal. The other lives or dies on your hold strategy. If you’re used to traditional video poker, do not assume this plays the same way — check the specific title’s rules screen before your first real-money hand, because two separate write-ups of this exact game can’t even agree on which sub-genre it is.
The practical implication: on a £1 stake, a 99% RTP returns £99 for every £100 wagered over a large sample. If the unconfirmed 99.50% figure from the secondary source is accurate instead, that’s an extra 50p per £100 — not nothing over a long session, but not enough to build a strategy around when the number itself isn’t confirmed.
Zoom out and 99% is still a strong headline number regardless of which figure turns out to be correct. Most video slots in 2026 sit in the 95.5–97% range as the operator-facing default, with some studios letting operators dial that down further before it ever reaches a live casino floor. A card game clearing 99% — even the more conservative of the two competing figures — sits well above that baseline. The question isn’t whether 99% is competitive. It clearly is. The question is whether you can trust it as published, given that the two aggregators most likely to be cross-checked by an informed player disagree by half a percentage point and by a factor of four on max win.
Why would two review sites disagree this badly on the same game? The honest answer: RTP data for smaller, B2B-only studios like Orbital doesn’t always come from a single audited source that every aggregator pulls from directly. Some figures get scraped from operator-facing game info panels, some from studio press kits, and some from older cached data that never got updated after a game’s paytable changed. None of that is unique to Orbital — it’s a structural problem across the long tail of the iGaming provider market — but it’s worth knowing before you treat any single number as gospel.
Grid, bet range, and what’s actually missing
Confirmed specs (SlotCatalog):
- Provider: Orbital Gaming
- Release: approximately September 2023
- Classification: Card games
- RTP: 99%
- Max win: x1000
- Min bet: $0.10
- Max bet: $100
- Variance: not disclosed
- Hit frequency: not disclosed
- Betways: not disclosed
- Named features: none listed
- Technology: HTML5/JS, 8MB file size
That last point is worth pausing on. Variance is marked N/A on the primary source. No slot review generator worth using should slap a “medium volatility” label on a game its own aggregator hasn’t rated — so I won’t. One secondary source claims medium volatility; I can’t verify it, so treat that as unconfirmed, not fact.
The bet range is consistent across two independent sources at $0.10 to $100, which gives it more confidence than the RTP figure. That’s a wide enough spread to work for a casual $2 session or a $100-a-hand high roller, assuming the casino you’re playing at doesn’t cap it lower.
Mobile performance and technical footprint
One area where the sources actually agree: this runs on HTML5 and JavaScript, and SlotCatalog lists the file size at just 8MB. That’s small even by card-game standards, and it matters more in 2026 than it did when the game launched in 2023 — a lightweight HTML5 build loads fast on mid-range Android hardware and doesn’t chew through mobile data the way a heavier, animation-dense video slot will. For a game with no bonus round, no cascading reels, and no elaborate feature sequence to render, that lean footprint tracks with what you’d expect. If you’re the kind of player who cares more about a game loading in two seconds on a train connection than about big flashy transitions, that’s a genuine point in this game’s favour, and it’s one of the few specs here that isn’t contested.
How the hand actually plays out
Because the underlying mechanic is contested between sources, here’s what I can say with confidence based on the framing that’s repeated and attributed to the primary data source: this is a beat-the-dealer format, structurally closer to Casino Hold’em or Ultimate Texas Hold’em than to Jacks or Better. You’re not managing a hold/discard decision across a five-card hand you control from start to finish — you’re being dealt a hand and comparing it against the house’s hand, with the payout determined by which hand ranks higher under standard poker hand rankings (high card up through royal flush).
That distinction changes what “strategy” even means here. In Jacks or Better, your entire edge comes from correct hold decisions — keep four cards to a flush draw instead of settling for a made pair, and you shift the long-run return meaningfully. In a beat-the-dealer format, if there’s no discard step, the outcome is closer to a fixed-odds coin flip dressed in poker hand rankings. No published source confirms a discard or hold mechanic for this specific title, so I’m not going to invent one. If the game does include a hold step, Orbital hasn’t documented it anywhere I could verify, and neither has any aggregator with confirmed accuracy.
You might ask: why does that distinction matter if the RTP is fixed either way? Because RTP tells you what happens over thousands of hands — it says nothing about variance per hand, and variance is exactly the number that’s missing here. A beat-the-dealer format with no player decisions typically runs tighter and more frequent small losses/wins than a draw-based game, where a single well-played royal flush can carry an entire session. Without a confirmed hit frequency or variance rating, budgeting a bankroll for this game is closer to guesswork than it should be for a 99% RTP title.
Standard poker hand rankings, for reference
Whatever the exact hold/discard mechanics turn out to be, the payout hierarchy across every video poker and poker-adjacent RNG game follows the same order, worst to best:
- High card
- One pair (note: in classic Jacks or Better format games, anything below a pair of Jacks pays nothing — whether that threshold applies here is unconfirmed)
- Two pair
- Three of a kind
- Straight
- Flush
- Full house
- Four of a kind
- Straight flush
- Royal flush
That’s the skeleton every card-comparison game in this genre is built on, Orbital’s Video Poker included. What differs game to game is the specific payout multiplier attached to each rank, and Orbital hasn’t published a paytable for this title anywhere I could locate. That’s a genuine gap — without a paytable, you can’t calculate expected value per hand, which is normally the single most useful thing a video poker review can hand a reader.
For context on how rare these hands actually are, the classic Jacks or Better format gives a useful reference point, even though it isn’t the exact game Orbital built. Under optimal play on a full-pay 9/6 table, a pair of Jacks or better lands roughly once every 4.83 hands, while a royal flush shows up only once every 40,391 hands. Those frequencies are specific to draw-based Jacks or Better and assume correct hold decisions — they won’t map cleanly onto a fixed-hand, beat-the-dealer format where there’s no draw round to influence the outcome. But they’re a useful sanity check on how top-end hands behave across the genre generally: royal flushes are rare wherever you play, and no game format changes that basic card-math reality.
Two RTP figures, side by side
Since the RTP conflict is the single biggest open question here, it’s worth laying the two competing pictures out directly rather than burying the comparison in prose:
| Detail | SlotCatalog (primary source) | Online-Slots (secondary source) |
|---|---|---|
| RTP | 99% | 99.50% |
| Max win | x1000 | x4000 |
| Grid/format | Not specified — framed as hand-vs-dealer | 5×3 grid, single payline |
| Bet range | $0.10–$100 | €0.10–€50.00 |
| Volatility | Not disclosed | Medium (unverified) |
| Features | None listed | Wild Symbols |
I’m treating the SlotCatalog column as the more reliable read, in line with the sourcing hierarchy this review follows — official provider data and top-tier aggregators outrank promotional slot-directory copy. But the gap is wide enough that I’d rather show you both sets of numbers than quietly pick one and pretend there’s no disagreement.
What a hand of this actually looks like, step by step
Because Orbital hasn’t published a rules sheet I could locate, here’s the sequence as it’s described consistently across the sources that cover this specific game, with the caveat that the hold/discard step is the one detail those sources contradict on:
- Set your stake. Between $0.10 and $100 per hand, adjustable before you deal.
- Deal. You’re dealt a hand from a standard 52-card deck; the dealer is dealt a hand as well.
- Optional hold/discard (contested). SlotCatalog’s own copy makes no mention of a hold step and frames the entire round as a straight hand-versus-hand comparison. A separate aggregator describes a genuine hold/discard round similar to Jacks or Better. I can’t confirm which is accurate for this specific build, so if you play it, check the in-game rules screen before wagering real money — don’t assume either description is correct.
- Reveal and compare. Your final hand is compared against the dealer’s using standard poker hand rankings.
- Payout. A win pays according to the game’s paytable, which — as covered above — isn’t published anywhere I could verify. Expect the payout to scale with hand strength, consistent with every other game in this genre, but don’t expect to calculate your exact edge per hand without that table in front of you.
That gap at step 3 and step 5 is the single biggest practical issue with recommending this game confidently. A returning player used to Jacks or Better will walk in expecting to make decisions that affect their return. If this build doesn’t actually offer that, the “strategy” section of any guide to this game is fiction dressed up as advice — which is exactly why I’m not writing one here.
No bonus round, no jackpot, no buy-in feature — and that’s fine
Unlike the slot side of Orbital’s catalogue, there’s no evidence of a bonus round, a progressive jackpot, or a bonus-buy option attached to this game. None of the sources I checked — SlotCatalog, Online-Slots, Slots Paradise, or Casino Guru — mention any of the three. For a card-comparison game built around a single hand-versus-dealer resolution, that’s structurally normal. Jacks or Better and Casino Hold’em variants across the industry rarely carry bonus rounds either; the game’s entire identity is the base mechanic. I’m not marking its absence as a weakness here — I’m marking it as expected for the format, and stating it plainly because the brief requires an explicit answer either way.
The 2026 picture: no sequel, but a same-studio sibling worth knowing
Orbital hasn’t released a Megaways, Power Reels, or any other enhanced variant of Video Poker specifically — there’s no sequel to compare it against. What Orbital does have in the same mechanic family is Casino Hold’em, also by Orbital Gaming, also framed around <cite index=”41-1″>forming a card combination that is superior to the dealer’s hand</cite>. Unlike Video Poker, Casino Hold’em’s SlotCatalog listing explicitly flags that it has RTP ranges — meaning the operator can select from multiple published RTP tiers, a detail Video Poker’s listing does not carry. That’s a meaningful difference for anyone comparing the two: Video Poker gives you one fixed number (however contested that number is across sources); Casino Hold’em gives the operator room to configure a lower return without telling you upfront which tier you’re on. Neither approach is strictly better — a single fixed RTP is easier to trust, an RTP range gives the operator (and by extension, a well-regulated market) more flexibility to price the game for different segments. Worth checking which one you’re actually playing before you assume the number quoted in any review applies to your specific casino.
Beyond Orbital’s own catalogue, the wider beat-the-dealer and video poker segment has two useful reference points. Full-pay 9/6 Jacks or Better — the industry-standard traditional draw game — returns 99.54% under optimal play, but that figure assumes correct hold decisions on every hand; play it wrong and the real return drops well below Orbital’s flat 99%. Double Double Bonus Poker, a common Jacks or Better variant, sits at roughly 98.98% RTP on a full-pay table with correct strategy. Both of those numbers are strategy-dependent — they’re the ceiling, not the guaranteed return. Orbital’s Video Poker, whatever its exact mechanics turn out to be, appears to offer its 99% as a flat figure with no skill requirement attached, which makes direct comparison genuinely difficult. A skilled Jacks or Better player can out-earn Orbital’s 99% over time. A player who doesn’t know correct strategy — and most casual players don’t — will very likely underperform it.
There’s a wider category worth placing this against too: live-dealer beat-the-dealer poker games from the major studios. Evolution Gaming and NetEnt both run their own Casino Hold’em builds, and BetGames runs a Bet on Poker format that lets multiple players bet on outcomes across a live-streamed round rather than playing a single hand each. None of those studios have published figures I could independently confirm for this comparison, so I won’t quote numbers I can’t source — but the category context matters: beat-the-dealer poker as a genre spans everything from fully live, human-dealt tables at major studios down to small, RNG-only, B2B-only builds like this one. Orbital’s version sits at the small end of that spectrum: no live stream, no other players, no side bets, just you, the dealer hand, and a fixed (if contested) RTP.
So: is this a high roller’s game, a recreational pick, or dead weight in a 2026 lobby? It’s a recreational pick, specifically for players who want poker hand rankings and card-game pacing without learning a hold/discard strategy chart. It’s not a high roller’s game — the $100 max bet and x1000 max win ceiling are both modest next to what genuine high-variance slots or high-limit table games offer. And it’s not dead weight either, provided a casino actually lists it; SlotCatalog’s own scan found zero US-NJ casinos currently carrying it, which says more about limited distribution than about the game itself.
Where you’ll actually find it
This is the part of the review I can’t dress up. SlotCatalog scanned its full list of best-rated US-NJ casinos and came back with nothing — Video Poker (Orbital Gaming) wasn’t listed at a single one of them at the time of writing. That’s not necessarily a red flag on the game’s fairness or legitimacy; Orbital is a B2B studio distributing through aggregation platforms like GrooveGaming and Reevo, and plenty of its content shows up on newer or smaller operators rather than the established brands that dominate review-site “best casino” lists. If you want to play this specific title, the realistic path is checking newer casino platforms that advertise Orbital Gaming as part of their provider roster, rather than assuming it’ll show up at a major, long-established brand.
That distribution gap also explains part of why the RTP data is so inconsistent across sources — a game with limited, shifting casino availability gets less scrutiny and fewer independent audits feeding into aggregator databases than a title sitting on hundreds of platforms simultaneously. It’s a pattern worth recognising across the wider B2B provider space, not just here.
Verdict
Play it if: you want a low-friction card game with a genuinely competitive headline RTP and you don’t want to memorise a Jacks or Better strategy chart to get there. The $0.10 floor also makes it accessible for small-stakes sessions.
Skip it if: you’re the kind of player who wants to extract every fraction of a percent through correct strategy — there’s no confirmed hold/discard mechanic here to strategise around, no published paytable to calculate hand-by-hand EV, and no variance rating to help you size a bankroll. A full-pay Jacks or Better machine, played correctly, gives you more control and a higher ceiling.
The one number that limits this game most isn’t the RTP — it’s the missing paytable. Without knowing what a full house or a straight flush actually pays relative to your stake, you’re trusting a headline percentage you can’t independently verify hand-by-hand. Until Orbital or a major aggregator publishes that table, treat the 99% figure as a reasonable but unconfirmed-in-detail starting point, not a number to build a bankroll strategy around.
