Royal Caribbean Slots or Video Poker: Which Reaches Prime for Less?

Royal Caribbean moved video poker from one point per $10 wagered to one point per $15 in the April 2026 casino year, one of the changes covered in 4 Royal Caribbean Casino Changes That Cost You More. This post answers the follow-up. If video poker got worse, should you switch to slots?

Every dollar figure below is our own calculation from Royal Caribbean’s published rates. Royal Caribbean publishes none of these totals itself.

How do Club Royale points work?

Points come off what you wager. The industry word is coin-in. Every dollar through the machine counts, including the dollars you bet with money you just won. That is why you can leave a machine even for the day with hundreds of points earned, and leave down $400 with almost nothing.

Three to one. That ratio drives everything below.

What does Prime status get you?

Prime is the second Club Royale tier and it sits at 2,500 tier credits.

At Prime, Royal Caribbean waives the casino convenience fee, covers drinks while you play, discounts internet packages, opens friends-and-family rates, and gives you a complimentary interior stateroom once each casino year. Royal Caribbean confirms the fee and the waiver but publishes no amount. Players report around $3 a transaction.

The cabin is the real prize. An interior on a seven-night sailing runs several hundred dollars before taxes and port fees.

When in the casino year should you earn it?

Early. The Club Royale year runs 1 April through 31 March. Reach a tier at any point in that year and you hold it for the rest of that year plus the entire following year.

Reach Prime on an April sailing and you hold it until March two years later, close to 24 months. Reach it in February and you hold the same status for barely 13 months. Same points, same money, roughly half the runway. If you are choosing between two sailings and you will play either way, the earlier one is worth close to double.

There is a flip side. Sitting at 1,800 points in February with a sailing booked, finish the climb. Those points reset on 31 March whether you use them or not.

What does it cost to reach Prime on slots?

2,500 points at $5 a point is $12,500 in wagering. You do not lose $12,500. That much has to pass through the machine, most of it recycled winnings you keep betting.

What it costs depends on the house edge, and shipboard slots run tighter than land casinos. Payback at sea gets reported as low as 85 percent, against roughly 90 to 95 percent on land. No cruise line publishes payback and no regulator makes them, so those are estimates rather than figures you can look up.

The 8 percent line is a land casino number. Nothing found suggests shipboard slots run that loose. It is included so the range stays generous to slots. The realistic figure sits nearer the top. Call it $1,000 to $2,000, averaged across a lot of play rather than predicting your week.

Time is where slots win. At $5 a spin and 600 spins an hour, that is $3,000 of coin-in an hour, or 600 points an hour. 2,500 points lands in a little over four hours. Two evenings across the sea days of one sailing.

What does it cost to reach Prime on video poker?

2,500 points at $15 a point is $37,500 in wagering. Three times the slots figure.

Video poker carries a lower house edge, and the odds are printed on the machine. That is the whole reason serious players moved to it. The problem is that the paytable at sea is worse than the paytable on land. The Jacks or Better gold standard is 9/6, meaning nine coins for a full house and six for a flush, at a house edge under one percent. You will almost never see 9/6 on a cruise ship.

The guides that cover cruise video poker describe 6/5 and 7/5 as the normal range at sea, at denominations from a quarter up to a dollar. The 8/5 machine comes from player reports and appears in no source that can be named. Look for it. Do not book a sailing expecting to find one.

Time is video poker’s real problem. At the same $3,000 of coin-in an hour, it earns 200 points an hour against 600 on slots. 2,500 points takes 12.5 hours. That is most of your sailing.

Slots or video poker: which is cheaper?

Read the 6/5 line again. $1,900 is what the tightest slot machine on the ship costs you, the worst end of the range. So the most common video poker machine at sea costs what the worst slot costs, and takes three times as long. The lower house edge cancels the three to one wagering penalty about halfway.

The old story was that video poker is the smart player’s route and slots are for people who do not know better. That held when a point cost $10. At $15, on a 6/5 machine, it stopped holding.

On a good machine it still holds, with a caveat. An 8/5 paytable reaches Prime for a little over $1,000. Against a tight slot that saves you around $800. Against a loose one it saves you about $13.

You cannot tell which slot machine you are sitting at, because the setting is printed nowhere. The paytable is printed on the screen. One of these games lets you see what you are buying.

These are averages over a lot of play, and a single run to Prime is not a lot of play. Variance swamps the gap on any one sailing. The math tells you which route costs less if you do this year after year.

What else decides the answer on your sailing?

Check the paytable. Look at the full house and flush rows before you sit down. Fifteen seconds, worth several hundred dollars across a run to Prime.

Learn the strategy. Every return figure above assumes you play the hand correctly every time. Those are ceilings. Play by instinct and you give back one to two percent, which erases the whole advantage over slots.

Count your sea days. Casinos close in port and open in international waters. Bermuda allows play from 9pm to 5am, Nassau from 7pm to 3am, and Alaska has its own coastal allowance. Royal Caribbean’s own guide says the casino stays open while docked at Perfect Day CocoCay, so count that stop as a sea day for earning.

Watch your denomination. Moving up is the only way to speed up video poker, and it raises your exposure by the same multiple. Cruise guides report machines topping out near a dollar.

Skip the free play math. Free play earns no tier credits. Royal Caribbean’s own terms exclude promotional and free play from tier earning, so the credits that pulled you onto the slot floor move you nowhere toward Prime. Play them, take the value, then start your climb to 2,500 from zero.

Do table games earn Club Royale points?

They do, on a different system. No card reader counts your wagering. A staff member rates your play by hand, watching your time at the table, your average bet and your pace.

That creates the most expensive mistake in this post. Sit down, buy in with cash, play three hours, never hand over your SeaPass card, and you earned nothing. The play still cost you what it cost you.

Blackjack with correct basic strategy carries a lower house edge than anything else here. On decent rules it is the cheapest coin-in on the ship, and that advantage disappears if nobody writes your play down. Hand your card to the dealer when you sit down, and check your balance at the Club Royale desk before the sailing ends. Fixing a missing rating from home is close to impossible.

So which one should you play?

If the ship has an 8/5 machine at a denomination you are comfortable with and you know the strategy, play video poker. Expect to spend three times as long, so pick an itinerary with sea days.

If the only video poker on board is 6/5, play slots. Same time-adjusted outcome for less of your vacation, no strategy to learn, and that machine is priced like a bad slot anyway.

7/5 sits between the two. About $1,450 and still 12.5 hours. Defensible if you enjoy the game. If you are optimizing, slots get you there faster for similar money.

Now the part that matters more than any of it. Every figure above is a cost. Reaching Prime runs roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in expected losses before you see a single benefit, against a complimentary interior cabin worth several hundred dollars.

The cabin side got worse this year. Royal Caribbean moved comp cruise booking from an exclusion list to an inclusion list of around 500 eligible sailings, and some 2026 offers carry a $100 booking fee that is non-refundable if you cancel. The comp is real. It is worth less than it was in March.

If you were going to spend an evening in the casino anyway, this post tells you how to get more status out of money you were already spending. If you were not going to gamble, the cheapest route to Prime is the one where you do not. No version of this math puts chasing a comp ahead of not playing.

Club Royale is the casino program. Crown & Anchor is the separate loyalty program that runs off nights sailed, and the tiers there work nothing like these. That one is worked through in 6 Royal Caribbean Crown & Anchor Tiers Worth Chasing.