The movie The Vortex (free on Tubi) is set in 1980 at the MGM Grand. About 10 minutes in, the main character starts playing a video poker game that has a paytable that appears to only pay a royal flush and various 4-of-a-kinds. There also looks to be a secondary bet where 5 cards are dealt face down and the player turns over 2 of them to play. Can you provide any info on this game?
The only info we can provide is that this game, in all likelihood, was just a stylized or fictionalized video poker machine, not an actual casino game from 1980. We're thinking that it took at least of couple of cinematic liberties for the sake, perhaps (we haven't seen The Vortex) of some kind of drama.
Even the earliest video poker machines, which first became commercially viable around 1979 as Draw Poker, typically followed normal poker-hand rankings and paid for the royal flush, straight flush, four-of-a-kind, and on down to at least pair of jacks or better depending on the variation.
Such a major discrepancy, paying only royals and quads, would have been an extremely unusual paytable, perhaps for a particular promo or novelty, though we doubt even that. After all, if a commercial machine paid only those top hands, the theoretical return would be so low and the variance so high that the casinos, certainly of that day, would probably have been reluctant to deploy such lopsided, exploitative, unplayable paytables.
As for the secondary bet, where the player flips two of five face-down cards, that neither lines up with standard video poker from that era nor ring any bells for us. We did find a video game called Double Up made by Cal Omega Products, a maker of early video poker and blackjack gambling machines, but that didn't come out until 1982, likely three years after the movie wrapped production. And it was a standalone machine, not a side bet on a royal-quads VP game.
So The Vortex game was probably a movie invention.
