Slot Machine Odds Explained Before slot machines were designed with computer chips, it was easy to calculate slots odds for hitting a jackpot. It was a matter of multiplying the number of symbols on each reel by a factor of the number of reels. Odds of Winning Slots: Around 1 in 49,836,032. You play slots by putting money into a slot machine and pulling a lever or pushing a button to spin a wheel. Depending on where the wheel lands, you win or lose. Slot machines have various odds of winning, and the odds are printed on each machine, so be sure to read them before you select a machine. Tips to Win at Las Vegas Slot Machines By Stephen Barron Jr.; Updated April 12, 2017. The slot machine offers jackpot amounts that can make someone a million dollar winner with a simple $3 bet. The progressive nature of the game makes the casino player feel like they have a chance to break the bank. The simplicity of the game also draws.
New slot machine players are going to find a lot of advice for beating the slots. Have a healthy skepticism when a slots expert tells you they know how to beat the slot machines. Among the games in a casino, video slots (in general) have a high house edge. Besides finding gaming machines with high jackpots and a low house edge, no skill or strategy is required to play slots. That means you can’t expect to increase your odds of winning in most situations.
Read through the advice below to optimize your chances of winning at slots. None of the advice assures winning sessions. Instead, it helps you stretch your bankroll, so you enjoy playing the slots longer. Also, the longer your bankroll lasts, the more chances you’ll have of hitting the big jackpot every slots player wants.
Use a Slots Card
Upon entering a live casino, sign up for a slots card. This provides comps and cashback, which automatically lowers the house edge by a bit. Never play a spin without using your slots card. In an online casino, accept the highest slots bonus and play according to the terms and conditions until you meet the wagering requirement. Once again, this lowers the house edge on online slots.
Make Max Bets
Look at the payout chart on a slot machine to determine how jackpots are paid. On many slot machines, the 5-coin bet pays out a higher percentage on the top fixed jackpot. For instance, a 1-coin bet might pay $200, a 2-coin bet might pay $400, a 3-coin bet might pay $600, and a 4-coin bet might pay $800. You might expect the 5-coin bet to pay $1000, but many slot machines pay out $1200 or $1500 in that case, trying to convince bettors to make the max bet.
If the jackpot increases a bigger percentage with a maximum coin wager, then it makes sense to make the max bet on a slot machine. If the bet size is too high for your tastes, then lower the coin denomination and make a max bet at that level. Of course, if there is no additional jump between the 4-coin and 5-coin bet, then you can wager a single coin and max out the coin denomination to the bet size you like.
Read the RTP Information
If an online casino or land-based casino publishes its return-to-player information, read through the RTP percentages to find the video slots with the best RTPs. Return-to-player or expected return is the percentage of a theoretical $100 you expect to see returned to you. It is a theoretical percentage based on probability, so an RTP of 95% does not assure you’ll be paid $95 for every $100 you put in the machine. You might lose $50 or you might win $150, or you might win a progressive jackpot and go home rich.
The point of the RTP percentage is to give a player an idea of their expected return. If two slot machines sit next to one another and one has an RTP of 93% and the other an RTP of 95% (and both have similar jackpots), then it pays to play the game with the higher percentage. Over time, this leads to you maintaining a higher percentage of your bankroll.
Money Management Techniques
Read about bankroll management techniques. “Money management” or “bankroll management” is a series of steps you take to lock on winnings when good luck happens and limit your losses when a bad streak occurs. These do not assure that you’ll win, but it optimizes your bankroll.
Players should know three core bankroll management methods: percentage betting, win goals, and loss limits. Learn to calculate your bankroll and divide this into percentages. Then bet between 1% and 5% of your bankroll on any given hand, depending on your capacity for risk. This limits the amount of your stake you lose on any given session, keeping you playing for longer throughout your vacation. It is a given that people go to the ATM machine or credit card when they lose their whole bankroll — which means you spend more than you intended. The point of percentage betting is to assure your bankroll last through your whole trip, so you never have to replenish.
What Is a Bankroll?
“Bankroll” is not defined as your entire bank account. It isn’t defined as your discretionary spending budget or the money you have earmarked for entertainment expenses. Instead, it is a part of your discretionary spending cash and entertainment budget which is set aside specifically for gambling. In this case, a bankroll is less than your entertainment budget.
Once you have your bankroll figured, divide this into easy to understand percentage. If you have a bankroll of $1000, then divide this into percentages. These are simple calculations, but you should have an understanding of 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, and 20% of your bankroll. In the earlier example, 1% would be $10, while 2% would be $20. 5% would be $50, 10% would be $100, and 20% would be $200.
Now that you have these, decide whether to bet 1% to 5% of your bankroll. Most experts suggest betting no more than 1% to 2% in order to maintain your bankroll throughout your casino trip or online slots session.
Setting a Win Goal
Next, set your win goal. This is the amount of winnings you set as your goal for any given slots session. If you have a win goal of 10%, then your win goal would be $100 for any given slot machine sessions. As soon as you hit that goal, you walk away from the slot machine — no matter what. A win goal is a hard-and-fast rule, because it locks in winnings. One of the biggest mistakes players make is losing back their winnings, because they think they’re on a hot streak.
Setting a Loss Limit
Even more dangerous is trying to win back cash you just loss. To protect against this tendency, set a loss limit. Once again, make this your hard-and-fast rule. Typical loss limits can be 5%, 10%, 15%, or 20% — though 20% means you could lose the entire bankroll in 5 slots session. 10% to 15% is a good middle ground. Once you’ve lost that amount, walk away from the slot machine under all circumstances. The slots game is not “due” to pay out, so step away from the machine and clear your mind.
Win goals and loss limits guard against gambler’s fallacy. Gambler’s fallacy is the idea that the law of averages assures or weight the odds in your favor. Slots use random number generators and every spin is entirely separate from the previous spin. Losing the last spin does not make it more likely you’ll win the next spin. The odds stay the same, no matter how many wins or losses in a row you’ve had.
Avoid Progressive Betting
For that reason, avoid progressive betting systems like the Martingale system, D’Alembert system, Fibonacci system, and so on. Betting experts have used computer simulations to track the progressive betting methods against flat betting (same bet each spin). Flat betting beats all of the progressive betting schemes over 1 billion spins.
Progressive betting seems like it’s working, because it leads to a lot of small winning sessions. The problem is that it also has a handful of huge losing sessions which wipe out all the wins — and then some. You can’t beat the house edge with the Martingale system, however it might look to the naked eye. The Fibonacci numbers are incredible, but they are not a magical way to beat the casino.
Slot Machines Odds
The reason progressive bets are bad is they increase the size of your bets (in some systems exponentially). If you start with $5 or $10 bets, a streak of bad luck has you betting hundreds of dollars on one spin. That’s busts your bankroll and leads to a “risk of ruin” — meaning you’ll lose your whole bankroll if you hit a bad luck streak. No matter what you read online, flat bets are better.
Take Breaks for Rest and Refreshments
Play when you are at your best physically and mentally. Don’t play when you’re tired or sleepy. Don’t play when you’re hungry or thirsty. Take frequent rest and restroom breaks. If you get bored, take a break and walk the casino. Play another game to change up the betting pattern.
When you are rested and engaged, you won’t have distractions that might lead to bad decisions. The idea is to have fun, so if anything is causing you to lose focus on the entertainment aspect of the game, walk away and save your bankroll.
Don’t Go on Tilt
Tilt is a concept in poker where a player makes decisions based on emotional responses instead of solid strategy. It can cost a player a lot of money if they make bets based on anything but rational decisions. While going on tilt is not a concept in slot machine gambling, every game of chance has a personal component.
In short, don’t play when you’re agitated. Take stock of your inner thoughts. If your ego or anger is causing you to make irrational decisions, take a deep breath and calm down. If that doesn’t work, walk away and clear your head. It stinks to lose a series of bets, but what stinks more is to lose a series of bigger bets when you’re trying to make up for lost bankroll.
- How to Win:Français
Understanding slot machines is easy. They’re basically just a giant math equation. Casinos are so open about slot machines, they publish their own payback percentages in industry publications, and they often brag about the percentage that their machines pay back in a given month or year.
The most important odds to understand in slot machine gambling are a machine’s hit frequency and payback percentage. It’s impossible to ascertain the specific odds of winning on a given slot machine in today’s casinos, though. Gone are the days of 3 reels with 10 symbols per reel, when calculating the odds of hitting a given jackpot took little more than some back of the napkin multiplication. Still, hit frequency and percentage are easy to understand, and that information is easy to find.
Basic Slot Machine Odds
Now that random number generators power slot machines, the odds are more complicated. In the old days, figuring out your odds of winning on a slot machine meant dividing the total number of symbols by 1. If a slot has 3 reels and 10 symbols on each reel, the odds of one particular symbol appearing on the machine would be 9 to 1, or 9 losing symbols and 1 winning symbol. To figure out the odds of hitting 3 particular symbols (for a jackpot), multiply your chances of landing one symbol three times by itself. You have a 1/10 chance of pulling up a particular symbol. The odds of pulling up a given 3 reel combination are 1/1000. That can also be expressed as 999 to 1.
Back to the random number generator: you just can’t use simple multiplication to figure slot machine odds any more. Modern slot machines contain so many different symbols, reels, and winning combinations, that a purely mathematical approach is out of most people’s reach. Understanding a slot machine’s hit frequency and payback percentage are important because we can’t just sit there and figure out our odds by looking at the machine.
For example, with a modern slot machine, one symbol might appear one out of every twenty spins. A second symbol might appear one out of every ten spins. And a third symbol might be set to appear one out of every fifty spins. But there’s no way to determine the settings unless you have access to the slot machine’s PAR sheet, which is what sets these specifications in the random number generator program.
Slot Machine Hit Frequency
The term hit frequency applied to slot machines means an informed estimate of the ratio of losses to wins on a given machine. As the number of wins in the ratio increases, so does the slot’s hit frequency rate. Because of the variety of ways to win on modern machines, figuring out a slot’s hit frequency is somewhere between taking a mathematical average and making a guess.
The Green Machine Slot Odds
One way to estimate a slot machine’s hit frequency is to play the machine 100 times and track the results. The cheapest way to do this is to find a nickel machine, pull the lever 100 times, and work out the ratio the hard way. Make a mark for every time during those 100 spins that you win, any win big or small.
What’s a good hit frequency? That depends on how much you’re looking to win and what kind of machine you’re playing, but most slot gamers consider any machine that pays out less than 10% of the time a bad machine.
To further complicate hit frequency, and to get a better overall idea of a machine’s odds, you can factor in the amount of winnings. Slot machines are often designed to pay out a lot of small winnings, so a hit frequency of 50% may seem like a loose slot machine, but if you’re only winning tiny amounts, you may want to move on down the line. On the other side of the coin, if a slot machine pays out only 9 or 10 times per 100 spins, but you win a ton of credits, you may be tempted to stay and press your luck for the big jackpots.
Slot Machine Returns
When you hear people talk about a slot machine’s return, they are referring to the percentage of money paid out by the machine compared to the amount of cash a gambler put into it. People who play slots at the tournament level keep track of these numbers and form strategies based on which machines to play at a given casino property.
To work out a return, you just need to do a little simple math. If you pumped $100 into a slot machine and at the end you’ve won $90 back, you just got a slot machine return of 90%. The casino kept $10 of your money for your troubles, but if that $100 kept you playing for an hour, you just had an hour’s entertainment for $10. That’s cheaper than going to the movies.
Slot Machine Odds Percentage
If you’re just a casual slot gamer, you don’t really need to keep track of slot machine returns. Casinos report their slot machine returns to local governments in most gambling jurisdictions, and those details and other figures are available to the general public. An easy way to stay on top of machine returns is to subscribe to Casino Player magazine or Strictly Slots magazine, where these numbers are published.
Slot Machine Payback Percentage
A final note on slot machine odds: don’t get too hung up on a slot machine’s payback percentage. Payback percentages are essentially made-up numbers, theoretical figures that make a guess about how much a particular machine will pay back to a gambler over time.
The trouble with payback percentage figures is that they’re developed from a pool of infinite spins. Think of payback percentage as slot machine returns in a vacuum. These numbers are used by game designers and casino managers and are not meant to inform gambling.
Increase Odds On Slot Machines
These numbers come from game manufacturers, who program a machine to return a theoretical amount to the customer. If a game designer advertises a slot’s payback at 95%, all that means is that over an infinite amount of time, the slot will pay back 95 cents for every dollar that is put in.
If you finished this article more confused than when you started, you’re in good company. Slot machines are straightforward gambling devices, little more than random numbers activated by a gambler. Still, modern technology has muddied the waters of actual slot machine probabilities, placing an emphasis on a game’s design and features rather than advertising it as a particularly player friendly machine.
Odds Of Winning On $100 Slot Machine
Just because a game designer produces a machine that is programmed to pay back 90% of money put in doesn’t mean that you will always make $90 for every $100 gambled. At the same time, understanding slot machine odds and hit frequency can inform your choice of casinos.