The sheer number of possibilities makes the math that goes into slot machine odds more complicated than on table games. The number of winning combinations and the payoffs per winner work together to determine a game’s odds. There also is an open field for game designers to assign how much each winning combination pays. There are thousands, and sometimes millions, of reel combinations. This is the key difference between slots and other forms of gambling: the rules and volatility change much more from game to game than they would for, say, BJ rule variants (S17, surrender, etc).Slot machine odds work in a similar fashion to the roulette example, except there are many more possibilities on the slots. A really lucky progressive hit could easily reach the thousands, depending on the ruleset. There's not too many games at the casino that can pay back hundreds of times your bet. That said, slots are a guilty pleasure of mine.

'Bonus only' channels are pretty popular and fun to watch but they don't really help in that respect. There are a lot of YouTube channels with live play to let you get a feel for the frequency and strength of the pays. Check out the pay tables and read the rules. Sometimes I'm in the mood to hit and run. Sometimes I'm in the mood to stretch out my play. But there are other machines that will take your money super fast with generally awful hits but once in a while a spectacular hit comes out to make it all worthwhile. But, if you put $20 in, it's easy to have that $20 last a long time but you'll probably lose it all. At my local, there are a few machines with paytables and symbol frequency where you can blow through hundreds of spins without getting anything more then 5x bet is nigh impossible, but most spins are between 0.25x - 2x bet. The trick is to find a game set to the volatility you are OK with. For the chance to win, some bets are going to have to pay back less than they take to place. The trend, over time, is to give back less than it takes in, but that volatility means that some machines on a given day might pay out more than they take.īest way to visualize it is a theoretical minimum-volatility game at 5% hold would literally pay 95 cents on every dollar bet. Each game itself has it's own volatility curve.

But that's over the lifetime of the machine. Sure, there's the payback percentage that you'll find pretty clustered together per denomination.

Can you actually win on slot machines