A character sits at a wooden table in a saloon. The cards come out. The pot grows. Someone across from you folds too easily, and you remember that tendency for later. This happens inside a cowboy simulation, and the poker feels real enough that you forget about the main quest for an hour.
Poker has appeared in video games for decades, but most early versions amounted to little more than random number generators with card graphics. The good ones, the ones worth discussing, found ways to make the stakes matter. Some connected winnings to in-game resources. Others built opponent AI with actual behavioral patterns. A few threw out the rulebook entirely and reinvented what a poker game could be.
When Card Tables Moved From Felt to Code
Video games borrowed poker long before developers understood how to make it work. Early attempts treated the card game as filler content, something players could click through between missions. The difference between those early versions and what exists now comes down to purpose. Red Dead Redemption 2 built behavioral AI that tracks opponent tendencies across sessions. Watch Dogs let players hack into phones to read opponent tells. These additions gave poker games a reason to exist beyond distraction.
Far Cry 3 tied winnings to weapon upgrades, making each pot a resource decision. Yakuza Kiwami offered three Hold’em variants at once. The medium proved flexible enough to accommodate everything from GTA Online’s Three Card Poker to Dragon Quest 11’s illustrated decks with treasure chest bonuses.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Sets the Standard
Rockstar’s 2018 western remains the benchmark for poker implementation in a non-poker game. The Texas Hold’em tables in Valentine, Saint-Denis, Tumbleweed, and Flatneck Station host opponents with distinct behavioral profiles. One player folds at the first sign of aggression. Another shoves with marginal hands. The game calculates pot odds and implied odds with the same precision found in dedicated poker software.
The AI tracks chip stacks and betting patterns across multiple sessions. An opponent who lost three buy-ins to your river bluffs will adjust their play when you sit down again. Tables remain active six years after release because the poker works on its own terms.
Arthur Morgan can access most locations freely, though the bounty system restricts access to Blackwater during certain story chapters.
Balatro Reinvents the Game Entirely
LocalThunk, a solo developer, spent two and a half years building something that uses poker hand rankings without being poker at all. Balatro released in 2024 and sold more than 5 million copies by January 2025. The game asks players to score points by playing poker hands from a 52-card deck, with limited hands and discards each round. Joker cards modify scoring in ways that compound and stack.
The awards followed quickly. Balatro won “Best Indie Game” and “Breakthrough” at the Golden Joystick Awards. At The Game Awards 2024, it took “Best Independent Game,” “Best Debut Indie Game,” and “Best Mobile Game.” The game also received a nomination for Game of the Year, a first for a project made by one person. PC Gamer named it their overall game of 2024, calling it “the poker roguelike that played its cards right all year.”
The staff at that publication kept returning to it throughout the year.
Yakuza’s Three Variants
Yakuza Kiwami gives players Texas Hold’em, Pineapple Hold’em, and Omaha Hold’em at the same table. Pineapple deals three hole cards instead of two, with one discarded after the flop. Omaha uses four hole cards and requires players to use exactly two of them with three community cards.
Yakuza 0 features similar poker tables scattered across its recreation of 1980s Japan. The stakes in these games affect your available resources, which in turn affect your ability to progress through certain storylines. Between street fights and real estate management, the card games serve as low-key decision points about how to allocate your time and money.
Watch Dogs Lets You Cheat
Ubisoft’s 2014 hacking game set poker tables throughout its version of Chicago. The Texas Hold’em here comes in four stake levels: low, medium, high, and super. Protagonist Aiden Pearce can use his phone to hack into opponents’ devices, revealing their hole cards and behavioral tells.
The cheating mechanic turns each hand into a different kind of puzzle. Knowing what your opponent holds changes the decision tree completely. A player holding pocket aces becomes predictable when you can see the cards. The mini-game stops being about reading behavior and becomes about maximizing extraction.
Far Cry 3 Ties Poker to Progression
Taking over the Valsa Docks outpost unlocks the poker tables in Far Cry 3. Winnings convert directly into currency for weapons and upgrades. The game uses Texas Hold’em rules, and later story missions reference poker during cutscenes.
This connection between the card game and the main progression system gave players a reason to care about each pot. Losing a hand meant losing potential firepower.
GTA Online’s Casino Floor
Grand Theft Auto V was the first game in that series to include poker, and it arrived through GTA Online rather than the single-player story. The Diamond Casino Resort offers Three Card Poker, a variant that rarely appears in video games.
Players can spend $1.1 million in-game currency on a Private Dealer for their penthouse, allowing access to poker and blackjack from home. The casino actively encourages building your bankroll through gambling, fitting the general tone of the Online mode.
Poker Night at the Inventory
Telltale Games released this crossover title in November 2010. The Heavy from Team Fortress 2 sits at the same table as Max from Sam & Max, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, and Tycho from Penny Arcade. A sequel arrived in 2013 with different characters.
The poker itself follows standard rules. The appeal came from hearing these characters, who share no fictional universe, trade insults and commentary during hands. Collecting a $50,000 pot unlocked cosmetic items like new table designs or card backs.
Steam delisted both games on May 23, 2019. Legal copies now trade for high prices among collectors.
The Unusual Variants
Dragon Quest 11’s casino in Puerto Valor uses a modified deck with illustrated characters replacing standard suits. Treasure chest bonuses appear during play. The game is video poker, five-card draw against the house rather than other players.
Tales of Vesperia takes a similar approach. Five-card draw determines payouts based on hand strength, with a five of a kind multiplying your bet by 100. No opponents exist. You play against the payout table.
Super Mario 64 DS and New Super Mario Bros both include Picture Poker. Mario characters replace the traditional suits, but the five-card draw structure remains intact.
The Witcher 3’s Adjacent Approach
Gwent started as a mini-game in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and became its own standalone title. The card game shares DNA with poker through its bluffing and folding mechanics, though the rules themselves differ substantially. Players build decks of unit cards with numerical values and deploy them across multiple rounds.
The popularity of Gwent within The Witcher 3 led CD Projekt Red to develop a free-to-play version. The mini-game outgrew its container.
What Makes These Work
The successful poker mini-games share a common trait: they give the player something at risk beyond the pot. Red Dead Redemption 2 invested in AI that remembers your tendencies. Watch Dogs offered information advantages through hacking. Far Cry 3 connected chips to bullets. Balatro built an entirely new scoring system on top of hand rankings.
The failures, which are numerous and not worth naming, treated poker as decoration. A card game without stakes is a random number generator. The best implementations understood that poker needs consequence to function.
