How slot machines work – and why you should think twice before playing them September 5, 2018 6.37am EDT. Anthony Frederick Lucas, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. What is a slot machine and how does it work. A slot machine is an electro-mechanical gambling machine utilizing randomized numbers to provide probable results. How a slot machine work is both more complicated and interesting than you would think. The machine features a payout table, reels, winning paylines, a credit meter, and arm or spin button. The payout table shows the player what each of the combinations is worth when three, four or five identical symbols appear on a single payline.

• How Slot Machines Work 2014 Polaris
• Slot Machines How They Work
• How Do Slot Machines Work

Slots are among the most popular ways to gamble. It’s easy to sit down, put your money in, and watch the reels spin. But there’s more going on than you might expect. Let’s take a look inside to understand what’s happening when you pull the lever.

Slot machines generally have three or more “reels,” each of which has a number of symbols. While physical slot machines may have 20 or more symbols per reel, digital technology allows them to have many more—some have 256 virtual symbols—with millions of possible combinations. The combinations of symbols that pay out if you bet on them are called “paylines.”

Slot machines contain random number generators that can generate thousands of numbers per second, each of which is associated with a different combination of symbols. Whether you win or lose is determined by the random number generated in the exact instant you activate each play—if it matches a payline, you win. Since each spin is independent, random and unrelated to previous or future spins, it’s impossible to predict what will happen on each play.

There are many different kinds of slot machines. Some allow you to choose how many paylines to bet on per play, and how much you want to bet. Before you put your money in, figure out the cost per play, the odds, the paylines, the return to player, and anything else that will help you make the right decisions for you. Look for pay tables on or near the machine that explain everything you need to know.

The possible payouts and the odds of winning depend on the machine you’re playing, the paylines you choose to play, and how many credits you wager.

Machines that cost pennies to play might pay out small prizes relatively often. Others cost several dollars per play, but offer bigger jackpots and higher odds. For instance, for the I Heart Triple Diamond penny machine, the odds of winning a prize are 1 in 12, but the odds of winning the top prize are only 1 in 649,400.

No matter what machine you decide to play, the odds always favour the house. This means that over time, it’s more likely than not that you will walk away with less money than when you started.

While machines can be programmed to pay out at higher or lower odds, a typical average house advantage for slot machines is 8%, meaning the average return the player is 92 percent. That makes slot machines less favourable than tables games such as fortune pai gow poker, blackjack and roulette, in terms of return to player.

Playing longer doesn’t improve your odds of walking away a winner.

Persistence doesn’t pay off. Each play on a slot machine is independent, unpredictable and unrelated to what happened on the previous play. A machine is never “due for a win” and they don’t “go cold” after a win either.

Soon after you leave a machine it wins a jackpot—that doesn’t mean you would have won if you had kept playing.

Future wins on a machine are completely unrelated to what happened when you were playing. Because random number generators determine the outcome of each play, the results of each play are totally independent from what happened before. Outcomes depend on what random number is generated in the exact instant a player presses play or pulls the lever.

Machines that are furthest from the aisle do not pay out more because they’re played less often.

How often a machine is played has nothing to do with how likely it is to pay out on the next play. Payouts are determined by the pre-set odds of the machine and the unpredictable results of the random number generator inside.

You cannot improve your chances of winning at most slot machines.

Most slots are games of chance, based on the random number generator. For some machines, bonus games offer you a chance to influence the outcome by interacting with an arcade-style video game. While skill may be a factor, the random number generator usually determines whether you even get to play the bonus game and the amounts available to be won—so chance is still a major part of the deal.

Understand how skill and chance work and how they affect the games you play.

Take this quiz to get a better understanding of your gambling habits.

Understand the role randomness plays in games of skill and how it affects the outcome of the game.

If you’re going to play slot machines, you should understand how slot machines work.

That sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many people have no idea how these games really work.

In this post I explain how slot machines work in simple terms that anyone can understand.

What Is a Slot Machine?

Real money slot machines are the basic gambling machine at most casinos, and slot machines generate 70% to 80% of most casinos’ revenue. In some casinos, they make up even more than that. They’re called slot machines because you used to put coins in a slot to play them.

Slot machines differ from other gambling machines because of the way the outcomes are generated. A video poker game is also a gambling machine, but it’s not a SLOT machine. Neither is a video blackjack game.

What makes a slot machine game a slot machine game are the spinning reels.

In early mechanical versions of the games, you literally had big metal reels powered by springs and levers. They spun and landed on various stopping points when the kinetic energy that caused them to spin was all faded.

Modern slot machines use a computer program to determine the outcomes. The spinning reels are just for show, even on machines that LOOK like they’re using physical reels.

But many – if not most – modern slot machines just use a computer monitor with animated reels to determine outcomes.

How Does a Slot Machine Come Up With a Random Result?

Modern slot machines used a computer program to determine the outcomes. This program is called a “random number generator” or “RNG.”

Here’s how the random number generator works:

It constantly “thinks” of a range of numbers. Each number corresponds to a combination of symbols on the slot machine reels and the payline. When you press the spin button, the random number generator stops on that combination.

But with a computer program, you could easily have a symbol that comes up once every 20 spins, another that comes up once every 5 spins, and another that comes up once very 10 spins.

These changes in probability can even happen from one identical machine sitting next to the other.

I’ll have more to say about that in this next point:

How Slot Machines Make Money for the Casino

All casino games give the house a mathematical edge. This is usually based on something simple – in blackjack, for example, the player has to play her hand first. In roulette, you have two green numbers, but the payout odds would be break-even if all the numbers were black or red.

With a slot machine, the house makes its money simply by paying out at lower odds than the odds of winning.

Each prize amount on a slot machine has a probability of happening. When you multiply that probability by the prize amount, you come up with the “return” for that combination.

Add all those returns together, and you get the total return for the machine.

That return is always less than 100%.

Here’s an example:

You might have a 55% probability of getting no win at all. This would apply to all non-winning combinations, so the return for any of the non-winning combinations would be 55% X 0, or 0.

You might have a 20% probability of getting a single cherry symbol that doesn’t match anything else on the machine, and that might pay off at even money (1 for 1). The return for a cherry-blank-blank combination would be 20% X 1, or 20%.

You then might have another 20% probability of getting a 2 for 1 payoff for any combination that includes a bar symbol and no other matches. The return for a bar-blank-blank combination would be 20% X 2, or 40%.

If you had no other combinations, the overall return on this game would be 40% + 20% + 0%, or 60%.

This means that on average, over a staggeringly large number of spins, you’d wind up getting back 60% of the money you bet.

At $3 per spin over 1000 spins, you’d have bet a total of $3000.

The odds say that you would have gotten $1800 in winnings, for a loss of $1200.

Of course, a real slot machine pay table would have more than three possible prizes, and at least one of those prizes would be large. The average slot machine has a 1000 for 1 jackpot for its top prize.

How Do Bonus Games and Other Slot Machine Features Work?

Modern slot machines have a staggering array of special features, too. One of the most prominent of these features are the slot machine bonus games.

Here’s how that works:

Some combinations of symbols result in a mini-game that you get to play. It’s called a bonus game. It might be as simple as getting 10 free spins, each of which is guaranteed a winner. It might be more involved, like getting to play a Space Invaders type game where each alien you shoot has a prize amount associated with it.

Scatter symbols are also popular. A scatter symbol is a symbol that triggers some kind of payout regardless of where it appears on the screen.

How Slot Machines Work 2014 Polaris

The 8-liners in Texas are a good example. A screen has three rows of symbols, for a 3X3 grid. It’s called an 8-liner because there are eight paylines.

You have three horizontal paylines, three vertical paylines, and two diagonal paylines.

You must activate each payline with a bet, and it’s possible to win multiple prizes on multiple paylines.

Think of paylines as being similar to the various patterns that bingo variants have.

Scatter symbols trigger wins regardless of where it is on the screen.

Wild symbols are also popular. These are symbols which can fill in for another symbol that you would need to trigger a win on that payline.

If you play poker, you’re probably already familiar with the concept of wild cards. Just apply that concept to slot machines, and you understand how it works.

These are just a handful of the special features that are now available on modern slot machine games.

How Do You Win at Slots?

I wish I had a foolproof winning strategy for slot machines that I could share with you.

But I don’t.

Slot Machines How They Work

No one else does, either, regardless of what they claim.

Slot machines are entirely random. You put your money in, and you take your chances. The only way to win on a slot machine is to get lucky.

You’ll find plenty of looney strategies that are supposed to improve your probability of winning. They’re all equally worthless.

One example is to find slot machine games on the edges of the banks near the walkways. The idea is that the casino managers want to attract players to the slot machines, and they do this by putting the looser games near the walkways.

Of course, this isn’t true in modern casinos. Even if it were true, it wouldn’t mean you were going to beat the casino. Such games would still have a mathematical edge for the house that you couldn’t overcome in the long run.

Another popular strategy I see touted is to look for hot or cold machines. A hot machine is one that has paid out several times in a row. The idea is that the game has gotten hot and is going to keep paying out.

A cold machine, on the other hand, is one that hasn’t paid out in a while.

If you have a 1 in 1500 probability of winning the top prize on a slot machine, that probability is the same regardless of whether the jackpot got hit on the previous spin.

It seems intuitive to think that if you just hit the jackpot, the probability of hitting it again on the next spin would be lower.

But that’s not the case.

It’s still 1 in 1500.

If you’re going to play slot machines, go into it with you eyes open and understand that it’s going to cost you money in the long run.

How Do Slot Machines Work

Don’t fall for lame, looney slot machine strategies.

Conclusion

Slot machines can be a lot of fun, but they’re like other casino games:

They’re more fun if you have some understanding of how they work.

After reading this post, you’re better educated that at least 80% of the slot machine playing public.