For a game based on chance alone, slot machines sure do have their fair share of experts who know exactly how to beat them.
For example, a slot machine consisting of three reels with 10 symbols on each gives you a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting the jackpot. Yet if each play costs a dollar, and the jackpot payout is only $800, then the odds are that you would lose $200 in the pursuit of winning $800.
As a slot player, you’ll inevitably come across folks who want to fill you in on their secrets to success. That’s all well and good, as these players are just trying to share their perceived knowledge with a new friend.
But unfortunately, luck-based gambles like the slots tend to bring out the worst in people when it comes to logic and common sense. You won’t find many games on the casino floor that have given rise to as many myths and misconceptions as the modern slot machine.
I meet well-meaning players all the time who tell me all about their pattern-tracking abilities, the best way to predict imminent jackpots, and various betting systems designed to goose the game. And like I said, these are fine human beings who simply don’t know any better – so I never fault them on that account.
Instead, I try to counter their bad advice with a few helpful nuggets of information. You’d be surprised how many slot enthusiasts out there don’t know a lick about things like payback percentage (return to player / RTP), venue selection, and bankroll management.
Those topics are reserved for another time and another page though, so here I’ll be talking about the worst advice I’ve ever heard about slot machines. The way I see it, learning what not to do can often be the best way to make course corrections within one’s gambling game. It’s one thing to outline the optimal approach, but actually breaking down the alternatives – and sorting through the associated consequences – is an example of showing the student rather than telling.
Below you’ll find a few of the most ridiculous pointers on slot machine play I’ve yet to encounter, along with the commonly deployed fallacies that most beginners fall prey to.
Payback Percentage Rates Should Be Taken as Gospel
One of the most misunderstood aspects of slot machine strategy concerns the metric known as payback percentage.
The average slot runs with a payback percentage of 95.00 percent, which most players – and even gaming experts – claim equates to a $95.00 average return on every $100 in average bets. And that’s true, but the key word to watch for there is average.
Payback percentage doesn’t take the average of your personal slot play, the casino’s overall activity, or even every machine of the same type in Las Vegas. Instead, it covers a far greater expanse: the infinite long run.
Mathematicians calculate payback percentage by comparing the probabilities of each winning combination with their respective payouts. But to do so, they require a sample size large enough to balance out the role of variance and randomization. That sample size, colloquially referred to as the long run, really represents every possible spin that a machine can and will play out.
Casino game analysts can only generate accurate payback percentages by using a theoretical sample consisting of billions of spins.
Of course, you’ll never be able to put that many spins in, even if you set up shop in the casino and played every waking hour.
Payback percentage simply isn’t meant for gauging your own personal chances of success. That 95.00 percent mark mentioned earlier doesn’t mean much in terms of a single session, or even a years’ worth of play. You may lose the full $100 a few times over, win a big jackpot, and then run through alternating swings of small collections and returns.
That’s just the nature of negative expectation gambling games like the slots.
Despite this fact, you’ll hear self-professed slot experts list off payback percentages like accountants. These players will swear up and down that the only way to achieve long-term success is by playing at the highest possible rates.
There’s actually a kernel of truth to that statement, but it works much differently than most players think.
The best way to take full advantage of payback percentage is by using it as a comparative measurement.
Depending on the pay line count, payouts, progressive element, manufacturer, and location, one slot machine can offer vastly different payback percentages than another.
If you’re familiar with Australia’s famous Aristocrat Company – one of the world’s leading slot machine designers – you’ve probably played their iconic Mr. Cashman game. This 2002 classic runs on a payback of 92.39 percent, which is far below the baseline figure of 95.00 percent.
On the other hand, Aristocrat offers a much higher payback of 97.05 percent with its newer The Walking Dead machine.
Now, like we said earlier, you’ll have just as much chance to win or lose during a single session, or even several sessions, when playing either of these games. But by comparing their respective payback percentage rates, sharp players will simply skip over the lower-paying Mr. Cashman game without a second thought.
These numbers may be theoretical in nature, but putting your money behind a game with a 4.66 percent higher payback rate will definitely reduce your volatility over the long run. Just remember, that long run is a little longer than most players realize.
Another way to make payback percentages work for you is by comparing various regions to determine where your money will be most effective.
Take a look at the table below, which displays the average payback percentage for the four major casino districts in Las Vegas:
$1 Slot Machines in Las Vegas
REGIONPAYBACK
North Las Vegas 95.74 percent
Boulder Strip 95.60 percent
Downtown / Fremont 94.78 percent
The Strip 93.03 percent
As you can see, playing the dollar machines on The Strip drops your average payback percentage by nearly two full percentage points under the 95.00 percent baseline. Conversely, heading up to North Las Vegas or the Boulder Strip areas can provide a slight increase over the baseline.
So long as you don’t take payback percentages literally, comparisons like these can help provide a mathematically sound guide to game selection.
Don’t Worry About Those Pesky Pay Lines
When newcomers enter the world of slots for the first time, things can be a bit overwhelming.
Some machines have just a single pay line – or the connecting line used to form winning combinations across the reels – while others offer 10, 25, 40, and even 100. Adding to the confusion, most machines allow players to toggle between pay line amounts, activating just one, a few, or most at varying costs.
As a result, slot rookies have dozens of configurations to choose from, and many make the basic mistake of playing less than the maximum amount.
We’ll get into the mathematical justification for max pay line play in a moment, but for now, I’m reminded of a common trope passed around the slot parlor.
Many players believe that a machine is built to offer the same odds against no matter how many pay lines have been activated. They’ll tell you that it doesn’t really matter how many pay lines you’ve turned on because each spin either produces a winner or doesn’t – and the payouts remain the same with one pay line or one hundred.
And as their argument continues, why should you spend extra coins to turn on all of those pay lines, when half will suffice?
Of course, this piece of advice is fatally flawed in two major ways.
First, pay lines simply provide additional opportunity to create winning combinations along the reels. Zigzags and diagonals, crisscrosses and “V’s” are all in play when you pay for the maximum pay line count.
And with more pay lines to work with, you’ll generate more payouts by default. Just think about it… with only 10 of the game’s 40 pay lines on board, you can see five identical symbols aligned along the reels – and still lose when they fall along a dead pay line.
Second, and most importantly, the theoretical payback percentage rate offered by a particular machine always assumes max-pay line play. In other words, when you see a game boasting a nice 97.00 payback percentage, that figure has been carefully calculated based on the probabilities associated with activating all pay lines.
Thus, playing anything less than the maximum pay line amount erodes your payback percentage right from the get-go – putting you behind the eight ball before the first spin is made.
On a final note, most modern video slots which come equipped with special features like side games and bonus rounds require max pay line play to enter those extras. Without it, you’ll be playing the base game alone, missing out on cool bonuses like prize wheels, trivia contests, and more.
Progressive Jackpots Are Where the Money’s At
Over $17 million at the M Resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
A $14.2 million payout at Rampart Casino in Sin City’s Summerlin area.
More than $12.5 million on a single spin at the Gold Dust West casino in Elko, Nevada.
These are just a few of the multimillion-dollar jackpots paid out by the Megabucks progressive slot machine network over the last five years.
Eye-popping numbers like these, and the life-changing returns they represent, have made progressive slots one of the most popular forms of gambling on the planet. For just a couple bucks, a single spin can transform into a fortune to last a lifetime.
For those that don’t know, a progressive jackpot network simply links all machines of the same type within a given casino or region. From there, a fractional amount of each bet is held aside for a special jackpot, one which gets progressively larger as time goes on. And with hundreds of machines, all contributing to one jackpot, progressive networks like Megabucks, the Lion’s Share game at MGM Resorts, and the Powerbucks machines at Caesars and Boyd Gaming properties can generate massive potential payouts.
Because of this, many slot players will recommend that you play the progressives above all else. As their reasoning goes, you’re going to be spending a set sum of money on the session as it is – so why not chase millions over thousands?
I’ll admit, the allure of a progressive machine can be quite strong, what with a huge sign overhead constantly ticking upward to higher and higher amounts.
But when slot players advise me to confine my action to progressives alone, I know they’ve been led astray.
First of all, progressives almost always cost more than the average slot on a per-spin basis. The Megabucks game and it’s $10 million starting seed advertises a $1 per spin rate, but you can only win the big one by max-betting for $3.
In exchange for paying more per spin, players on the progressive machines face much lower odds of actually cashing in. If you were playing the Powerball lottery, you’d be up against 1 in 11,688,053 odds to land five numbers (leaving aside the Powerball) and claim $1 million in prize money.
Those odds are long enough, but they pale in comparison to the 1 in 49,836,032 chance you’ll have of winning the Megabucks jackpot.
Finally, progressives must make up for the enormous payouts committed by the house, and to achieve that balance they reduce payback percentages to “sucker game” levels.
Remember that table of $1 slot payback percentages in Las Vegas we talked about earlier? Take a second look, along with Megabucks progressive payback rates for the same areas:
$1 Slot Machines in Las Vegas
REGIONPAYBACK
North Las Vegas 95.74 percent
Boulder Strip 95.60 percent
Downtown / Fremont 94.78 percent
The Strip 93.03 percent
$1 Megabucks Machines in Las Vegas
REGIONPAYBACK
Las Vegas 87.53 percent
Boulder Strip 88.91 percent
Downtown / Fremont 87.55 percent
The Strip 87.10 percent
These paybacks are reduced by between 6 and 8 percentage points, which is a truly massive gulf when gambling games are concerned.
Most sharp players frown on “carnival” games like American-style double-zero roulette, with its 94.74 percent payback rate. When you consider that Megabucks – and almost all progressive slot networks – offer the house double the edge compared to roulette, it becomes clear that these games are money traps above all else.
Line Play How Many Medals To Max Slot Machines
They can certainly be entertaining when played as a lark, but progressives are not nearly as lucrative as traditional games for everybody except the fortunate few to haul in the jackpot.
Those Slot Clubs Are a Scam
This piece of advice is heard less often nowadays, but you’ll still run into some stubborn holdovers who claim that slot clubs and player’s club cards aren’t worth your while.
These players believe that just because casinos can track their play in real-time when player’s cards are in use, they might be able to manipulate the results.
You might hear somebody say “Oh I was winning a bunch last month, but I had my card in so the overlords started sending me losers.”
Of course, this is a highly superstitious belief system with no basis in reality, as slot machines come equipped with random number generators (RNGs) that cannot be manipulated in any way by individual operators.
Another criticism of slot clubs is that they seldom offer the same sort of value as advertised. For many players, taking 10 minutes to sign up at the registration desk and obtain a slot club card for every casino they enter is viewed as a waste of time.
But the real waste is skipping out on all of the comps, bonuses, and other benefits afforded to slot club members.
If you put in any amount of time on the slots, joining the slot club and using your player’s card is simply a sound investment. And one that costs nothing but a few minutes of your time.
Once you’re signed up, slipping that card into the machine ahead of your sessions allows the casino to monitor your play. When they see that you’ve put in a few hundred dollars’ worth of action – win or lose – most casinos will label you as a slot enthusiast worth doing business with.
And when that happens, the floodgates open in terms of freebies.
You might receive an offer to come back for a free two-night stay after returning home, as the casino hopes to keep your slot business in-house. Or maybe an attentive pit boss will come by to hand you buffet vouchers and free drink tickets. No matter how your casino of choice doles out the goodies, slot club members are typically lavished with extras to keep them coming back for more.
My favorite item to receive as a slot club member is free-play, because the casino is effectively giving me no-cost opportunities to chase big-time jackpots. By combining the subsidies provided by free-play with the savings incurred by comped rooms and meals, slot club participants can easily offset the cost of their play over an extended session.
Everybody wants to win big at this game, but the best players know that canceling out losses and breaking even is just as good over the long run. It’s the only way to sustain your bankroll, and as a slot club member, you’ll soon discover that your bankroll has been stretched out and amplified.
Conclusion
Don’t believe everything you hear about slot machines. Learn from the worst advice I’ve ever gotten about slot machine to avoid falling into the trap that many other do.