Slot Machines How To Win And How They Work

How To Beat The Slot Machines
Best Slot Machines To Win On
Slot Machines How To Win And How They Work

For this article, I’ve poured through the seemingly endless slot machine tips and tricks out there, done a bit of experimenting myself, and come up with a list of the simplest, most effective ways how to win at slots. Slot machine tips that really work! Effective slots strategy means giving yourself the advantage. That leads us to tip number 1.

The gaming industry is big business in the U.S., contributing an estimated US$240 billion to the economy each year, while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 million jobs.

What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.

Spinning-reel slots in particular are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines and other forms of gambling.

What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.

The price of a slot

An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.

But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.

Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.

Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or expected house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.

For example, consider a game with a 10 percent house advantage – which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $900,000, resulting in a casino gain of $100,000. Thus from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.

Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels and receives no payout, that’ll be the price – not 10 cents.

So who is correct? Both, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.

A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.

Short-term vs. long-term

This difference in price perspective is rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.

Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.

Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two – it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners – which is why so many people play in the first place.

Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.

What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.

Raising the price

Ultimately, the casino is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope and variance. Even though a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, such as 4 percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.

This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table – which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table is visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination remains hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage – that is, the long-term price of the wager.

This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players – if they can get away with it.

Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.

This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.

Getting away with it

Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, believing that players can detect these price shocks.

Our new research, however, has found that increases in the casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.

Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere 3 feet away.

Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within each of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.

Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. And for price-sensitive gamblers, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.

Back in the old days, slot machines were simple. You made wins by getting three matching symbols across the middle row, and that was that. Oh, how times have changed!

Most online video slots have at least 20 different ways to win, although some of the old classic ones have as few as five paylines. However, traditional paylines themselves are going out of fashion. These days, there are all sorts of interesting game engines with lots of different ways to make winning combinations.

While these changes make playing slots more interesting, they can also be confusing. I’m going to explain how slot machines paylines work, and how to win slots on all of the different game engines you might come across today.

How Slot Paylines Work

Before we start exploring some of the more exotic slot machine payout structures, let’s recap how traditional paylines work. If you’re an expert player, you can skip this section. If you’re a new slot player, you’ll need to grasp this before you understand how any of the other game engines work.

Each slot has a unique number of paylines. It could be 10, 20, 30, or even 50; each game is different, but most slots fall into the 20 to 30 paylines range.

Paylines are winning patterns. If you land at least three consecutive symbols across one of these paylines, you’ll win a payout. However, for the biggest payouts, you’ll need to land five symbols across a payline.

Remember that each symbol pays out a different value. You need to consult the slot machine’s paytable to find out what the highest payout could be and what symbol will award it.

For Example:

Let’s say that you’re playing a 20-payline slot game, and the highest-value symbol pays 100x your stake. If you land five of these symbols on a payline, you’ll win 100x. However, if you fill the entire screen with these symbols, you’ll win 100x your stake on all 20 paylines, or 2,000x your stake.

Most traditional slot games only pay from left to right. However, some slots pay both ways. This means that if you get three symbols on the third, fourth, and fifth reels, you’ll get a three of a kind payout. That wouldn’t happen on a standard slot machine.

Before we move on from traditional paylines, remember that there are both fixed payline slots, and there are games in which you can decide how paylines you want to activate.

Cluster Pays Slot Machines

One of the first breakaways from traditional slot machine paylines was the cluster pays slot games from NetEnt. These did away with the idea of fixed paylines and introduced many more ways to win online slot games.

In a cluster pays slot, all you need are matching symbols to touch each other. Typically, you’ll need at least nine symbols touching to win a payout. However, in games like Aloha! Cluster Pays, you win the top prizes by landing 30 touching symbols, which would mean you’ve filled the screen with them.

How To Beat The Slot Machines

As in all other slot games, not every symbol is worth the same. As you can see from the paytable below, payouts range from 2,000x to 10,000x for 30 matching symbols. That’s quite a difference!

As you can see, cluster pays slots have some serious potential. They don’t all pay as much as Aloha! Cluster Pays, but you can experience some epic wins, and all you need is for those symbols to touch each other in some way; any direction, shape, or pattern will do!

Play’n GO has a similar payout structure in its grid slots. For example, in Sweet Alchemy slot, you’ll play on a 9×9 grid, and you make wins by forming clusters, too.

Megaways Slots

Big Time Gaming has always been an important casino gaming company, but in 2019, it catapulted itself to the forefront of the industry when it released its Megaways game engine. Lots of other companies like Blueprint Gaming, iSoftBet, and others have leased the Megaways game engine from BTG and have re-released some of their best slot machines with a Megaways facelift.

The Megaways game engine is unique in two ways:

It offers up to 117,649 ways to win.
It changes the number of ways to win on every spin.

Each time you hit the spin button, the game engine decides the number of ways to win for that spin. There’ll be a least a few thousand ways to win, and depending on the game, there could be up to 117,649. One Megaways game (Holy Driver) offers up to 586,971 ways to win, but it’s an exception.

The screenshot below is from Majestic Megaways by iSoftBet.

As you can see in the top left, on this particular spin, there were 30,240 ways to win. Because there are such a huge number of ways to win, the top payout for a symbol is usually relatively low.

Slot machines - how to win and how they work

For Example:

Majestic Megaways, the top symbol pays 50x your stake. Most Megaways slots also limit the largest possible payout at a quarter of a million or thereabouts. You can find out the maximum payout for each game in its paytable.

There are a few “out there” Megaways slots that are truly different from the others (Heroes Hunt comes to mind), but most of them are quite similar. They usually have avalanche reels, a free spins feature, and the ability to pay to play the free spins bonus round. UK players can’t pay to play the features because of UK Gambling Commission rules.

How to Win Bigger Payouts on Video Slots

In almost every slot machine online, you win the biggest possible payout by filling every position on the reels with the highest value symbol. However, there are some features that can boost your payouts significantly, even if you don’t manage to fill the reels with the top-value symbol. It’s good to be aware of these so that you can select slot games that offer them. I’ll describe how each feature works, and I’ll introduce a game that has it.

Avalanche Reels

NetEnt introduced avalanche reels when it released Gonzo’s Quest slot back in 2011. Since then, lots of other slots companies have copied it, although they typically call it something different such as “rolling reels” or “tumbling reels.”

With this feature in play, winning symbols will disappear from the reels, and new ones will fall from above or appear on the reels to replace them. For example, if you make a win right across the middle row, those symbols will vanish, and either every row will fall down one, and new symbols will fall across the top row, or new symbols will fall directly into the positions of the symbols that disappeared.

Not only is this exciting when it happens, but it can happen multiple times in a row, leading to a whole series of wins from one spin. I’ve personally experienced five wins in a row on an avalanche reels slot.

Win Multipliers

These are my favorite because they’re super simple, and they can boost wins by a lot. Win multipliers boost your base game wins by a specific multiple. For example, if you win a 1,000x payout with a 5x multiplier, you’ll win 5,000x. Simple, right?

Typically, multipliers are activated within bonus rounds like free spins features. For example, in Dead or Alive II by NetEnt, all wins in the old saloon free spins feature are doubled.

However, not all multipliers come through bonus features. In some games, special symbols have the power to multiply wins. Usually, these are wild symbols, meaning they have the power to replace other game symbols. For example, if you land four of a certain symbol and a wild symbol lands in the fifth position, that will be counted as a five of a kind win. If the wild has the power to multiply wins by 3x, then that win will be tripled.

Wild Symbols

As I mentioned above, wild symbols can replace most other game symbols to help complete and/or extend winning combinations. If you’re a symbol or two short of a payout, wilds can take care of that.

However, these days, wild symbols come in many forms. There are all kinds of cool features built around wild symbols, and when they trigger, some epic wins can occur.

For Example:

Wild symbols can expand to cover reels. If you land a wild symbol on the middle reel, for example, and it expands to cover that reel, it could create multiple wins at once. It doesn’t matter where the expanding wilds land, they can create several wins, and when combined with features like avalanche reels, I’m sure you can imagine the potential.

Sparks by NetEnt is a great game to try if you like the sound of expanding wilds. In this game, expanding wilds can clone themselves, creating even more potential wins.

Best Slot Machines To Win On

Wild symbols can do all sorts of things nowadays. They can expand, clone, spread across the reels, multiply, and overlay standard game symbols. In all of these cases, they create extra chances to win and can trigger multiple wins at the same time.

Summary