Learning To Play Slot Machines

When we play online slots all we do is imagining how the reels stop and the symbols align to trigger a big payout. Although enjoying and having fun is important when playing slots, there is more to it than just brainlessly gazing at the colorful symbols.

Slots Rules – Learn How to Play Slots When we play online slots all we do is imagining how the reels stop and the symbols align to trigger a big payout. Although enjoying and having fun is important when playing slots, there is more to it than just brainlessly gazing at the colorful symbols. Learn to Play Slot Machines at the Sahara Hotel & Casino on the strip in Las Vegas. Slot Machines are the most popular Las Vegas c.

Slots were created at the end of the 19^th century when they were introduced to local bars and pubs. Later they went on entertaining female guests at hotels or casinos. Actually, slots were used by clever casino operators to distract the wives of big mafia bosses and officials so they won’t take them away from their card games.

Slots are one of the players’ most favorite casino games, which do not require any skill at all, only tempered behavior. If you are new to playing online slots, we advise you to read carefully below how to become more efficient slots player, not just a “gung-ho” headless gambler. Slots can be very rewarding on the long run, and finding the slot game with the lowest house edge is a real treasure.

Slots Rules

At the basic level, slots are the easiest and simplest games out there, and nevertheless, they keep being abundantly offered at online and land-based casinos. However, there are several rules that you need to follow in order to be able to play slots, and afterwards we will give you a simple strategy. You will need to know that:

A payout is triggered when the necessary symbols align into a payline. In order to see what are the various paylines you can check the paytable that every slot game has displayed.
Slots have different number of paylines, they can range from 1 payline with the most basic slots, up to 50 paylines. Paylines don’t run in just horizontal lines.
A payline will not form if the necessary symbol doesn’t appear in the first reels, but has appeared in the other reels. To trigger the payout and to form the complete payline, the symbol must be aligned in the first reel too.
You can spin the reels by pressing the ‘Spin’ button.
You can always choose the number of paylines to play with. More paylines means more chances for a win.
Before spinning the reels, you must first select the number of coins per payline and the size of the coins. The coin size is multiplied with the number of coins.
To play for a progressive jackpot you need to play with the maximum number of coins. Just use the ‘Bet Max’ button.
Slots can have a minimum of 3 reels, and range up to 9.

The Basics of Slots

Objective of the Game

As in any casino game, the objective of the slots is to get the highest possible payout by combining the appropriate symbols. But, you will need to know that the higher the wager that you make at each spin, the higher the payout will be. Wagering $1 per spin and wagering $10 is not the same. If you hit a 4,000 coins payout with a $1 bet, you will be paid $4,000, which is still great, but if you hit the same payout with $10 bet, you will receive $40,000, which is no doubt a more desired sum.

Paylines and Reels

The word “reel” can be best understood when you put it on the context of the original mechanical slot machines. It is simply a wheel with symbols on it that you can spin by pulling the lever or pressing the ‘spin’ button, and when the reels stop the symbols align to form a payline. Naturally, the same concept is used for online slots.

Payline is the line that runs across the reels and connects the symbols together. If the right combination of symbols appears on the reels when they stop spinning, the payline is triggered and a specific win is paid out. Today’s online slots have zig-zaged paylines that can run in different directions, but always from the left towards the right.

Bonus Features

Almost every slot has different bonus features. These bonus features can be very rewarding, while some may be really stingy. These bonuses can consist of different bonus rounds, second or even third bonus screens where you can score different amounts. In such cases you are usually required to click on few choices that will reveal your bonus winning, or depending on how innovative the game play is you may be even required to use your skills to win the bonus money. Bonus rounds are great because almost always they include multipliers that increase your winning sum by several times.

Gamble Feature

Some slots even have a gamble feature that we’ve seen in video poker games. This is when you have scored a win, and you are offered to double it in a separate screen by guessing what color the card will be, red or black. Or, in order to multiply your potential payout you can guess of which suite the card will be, whether clubs, diamonds, hearts or spades.

Game Features

A standard online slot game has several buttons with which you can play the slot. The most convenient option is probably the ‘auto play’ button. With it you can select how many spins you want to computer to make instead of you, while you do other important things on your computer, and not just hit the spin button the entire time. Also, you can adjust the size of your bet per line and coin size, and select the number of paylines. And the most important is the ‘Info’ or ‘Paytable’ button where you can see how much the slot game pays off for its paylines.

An Easy Slot Machine Strategy to Use

Before you begin playing slots, it would be wise to set up a strategy that will help you play safer and with more thought into it. A slots strategy doesn’t literally mean moves that you need to make just like in card games, it’s just a simple strategic thinking to help you save money.

The first obvious move is to select an online slot game and practice it first in free play. This will help you see if the game is really to your liking and how frequent the payouts are. Don’t worry, casino games in free play mode are just the same as real-money mode, only you play with fun money for the purpose of practicing.

After you’ve decided on the slot that you want to play with real money, you will need to set yourself a bankroll that you will use. You mustn’t exceed it at any moment. If you’ve made more than that bankroll, just walk away with the money. The point is not to lose your winnings and your entire bankroll ultimately just because you were greedy and thought the slot is hot. There is no such thing as a hot slot.

Play the slot in multiple sessions, and make sure to not spend all of your wagering money in one session. Once you notice you are having a losing strike, stop immediately, because losing leads to more losing by trying to make up for the losses.

If there are bonuses or free spins offered for playing that slot, use them without hesitation. Take the maximum advantage by using up such bonuses that essentially cost you nothing, but can extend your playing time greatly.

Summary

There will never be a shortage of slot games. We see them get developed and improved each day as new slots are released by different software providers. Microgaming has over 400 slot games, and most probably Playtech too. Now there are even awesome 3D animated slots by Betsoft that are pretty much of equal quality as a big animated blockbuster, with even more unique technical and game play features than before. Moreover, with the advent of mobile casino gaming, playing slots has become even more convenient than before. Now you can have you favorite slot with you wherever you will go.

Useful Slots Glossary

Free Spins: free spins are exactly what the name says, they are spins given for free. Free spins are triggered with a particular symbol, or are given through promotions.

Multiplier: some symbols in a slot game may be used to trigger a multiplier, and they are mostly triggered while playing bonus rounds or free spins. The multiplier further multiplies the winning amount of the payline that you’ve hit, and the multiplication usually is set from 2x to 5x. In some slots, multipliers increase as the symbols appear again that trigger the multiplier feature.

Scatter: the scatter symbol is another common feature in slots and is used to trigger scatter payouts as defined in the paytable for the game or to activate a bonus round.

Wild: this is probably the most important symbol in slots, because they can replace a missing symbol in a payline to trigger the payout. In video slots if you hit wilds on all reels you can trigger a jackpot or activate a multiplier.

For a more in-depth list of terms and phrases for Slots, visit our Glossary page here.

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Apparently playing slot machines is more fun than just about anything. Old articles about the casino industry used to tout that slot machines made up 70% of a casino’s revenue, on average. More recent literature suggests that it’s even more than that—along the lines of 80%.

I live near the Winstar Casino, and I have a number of friends who visit the casino at least once a week—sometimes more—just to play slot machines there. I’m not a fan of slot machines to begin with, although I enjoyed The Big Lebowski slot machine for about an hour during my last visit with my buddies.

I thought it would be fun to write a post explain how a smart person might play slot machines. I don’t know how smart I am, so a lot of this post will just look at what I THINK a smart gambler might do. Maybe this will help inform your own decisions.

1- Smart Slot Machine Players Don’t Play with Money They Can’t Afford to Lose

You’ve probably seen the expression, “scared money always loses.”

This is true for any kind of gambling, but maybe not for the reasons you think. It’s not a supernatural occurrence based on the vibrations you’re sending out into the universe.

The fact is, slot machines are a worse bet in the casino than almost any other. The odds are against you, and in a significant way.

If you have money set aside for rent, or for a utility bill, or for a child support payment, you shouldn’t gamble it on a slot machine. Slots are negative expectation games.

In fact, you shouldn’t gamble money you can’t afford to lose on positive expectation games, either. That’s because games of chance are RANDOM. In the short term, you can lose any game, even if you have a mathematical edge over the casino or the other players.

Any money you gamble with should be earmarked as part of your entertainment budget. The healthiest way to approach gambling on slot machines is to treat it as entertainment. You’ll sometimes win money, and that’s great, but there’s no way to become a professional slot machine player.

Don’t even try.

2- Smart Slot Machine Players Keep Detailed Records

I often relate a story about how I used to work in middle management in a corporation in Dallas. I wanted to be good at my job, so I studied several management books. One of the first and most important things I learned is that performance measured is performance managed.

This means that if you’re not keeping written records managing your performance, you’re making a mistake.

Of course, slot machine players aren’t professional gamblers, and they can’t improve their performance by playing more skillfully.

But I’m convinced that smart gamblers, even recreational gamblers, benefit from mindfulness. One of the easiest ways to be mindful of something is by paying attention to it. If you’re keeping records, it’s easy to pay attention to it.

Another benefit to keeping written records of your results at the casino is for tax purposes. If you win more than $6000 on a slot machine, the casino sends a notice to the IRS to report the income. If you’ve lost $4000 prior to that at the casino, you can probably deduct that and only pay taxes on your net winnings—the winnings minus the previous losses in that calendar year.

Finally, the biggest mistake I see most slots players making is their belief that they’re winning more often than they’re losing or that they’re breaking even.

The payback percentages for the slot machines in Oklahoma can’t possibly be higher than 75% or 80%. But all my friends are convinced that they’re losing far less money than they actually are losing. Some of them, in fact, are convinced that they’re net winners.

I have one buddy, though, who gambles so much that he’s moved up to the next tier of the players club. He gets a free cabana by the pool. He knows how much he’s lost so far this year. Even though he plays a lot and loses a lot, he knows the amount.

Knowing is better than not knowing.

3- Smart Slot Machine Players Count Funny Things

Some of the best advice I’ve ever read about playing the slots is that the most important thing you can do to minimize your losses is to slow down your rate of play. The more spins you make per hour, the likelier you are to lose a lot of money per hour. You don’t even necessarily get more pleasure out of it.

I took a recovering meth addict to the casino with me once. I’ve never seen anyone play a slot machine faster. If she wasn’t making 900 bets per hour, she was coming close. I’ve also never seen anyone lose that much money that fast.

I’d had a discussion with gambling writer Michael Bluejay a week before my last visit to the casino, though. He’d mentioned that he’d read one of my posts about how important rate of play was to your predicted hourly loss. It got me thinking about making actual measurements of my own rate of play next time I was at the casino.

The average number of spins per hour that everyone quotes when talking about slot machines is 600 per hour. I decided to see how close I came to that number, so I counted off each spin as I made it. I also waited until all my winnings were credited before making the next spin.

I made 201 spins in half an hour. (I used the stopwatch function on my phone to track this.) This means I was making 400 spins per hour on average.

That’s only 2/3 of the average, so I’ll lose 2/3 of what the average player will lose spending the same amount of time on the machine.

If you really think of gambling as entertainment that you’re paying for on an hourly basis, you’ll easily see why this is a good thing. Bargain gambling is good gambling.

I also tracked how much money I lost over that time period, so I was able to do a short-term calculation of the machine’s payback percentage. I know that with only 201 trials, my number isn’t close to perfect. But it’s still fun and interesting to track such things.

From a longer-term perspective, if you’re keeping records, you know how much you’re losing, and you don’t fall into the trap that some people do of thinking they’re winning at a game they’re actually losing.

4- Smart Slot Machine Players Take Advantage of the Players Club

I’ve weighed the pros and cons of the players club. Most writers in this industry, by the way, make an unqualified recommendation that you always join the players club. I don’t think this should be the default choice for everyone, though.

Here’s why:

The players club is a tool the casino uses to market to gamblers. If you’re more susceptible to advertising than the average person, you might wind up losing more money to the casino than is reasonable or expected.

Or you might just hate getting advertising in the mail.

The players club card is a credit card shaped plastic card that you insert into the machine so that the casino can reward you for your play. They give you points based on how much money you place in bets. These points aren’t related directly to your losses, either—they’re related to the amount you gamble.

If you wager $450 per hour through a slot machine with the card inserted, you’ll get points based on that amount even if you win over the course of an hour, a session, or a visit to the casino.

These points are then used to give you rewards like free food, lodging, and entertainment. The casino knows that the more you play, the more money they make in the long run. Their losses are averaged over thousands of players per day, and so are their wins. Since the slot machines pay out less than they take in, the casino has no doubt about its profit potential.

These rewards are cool and worthwhile, usually. I think, for most gamblers, especially smart ones, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks here.

But you know better than I do how important your privacy is. If you don’t want to get ads via direct mail, being a member of the players club might not be for you.

Keep this in mind, too. The casinos track your activity on the slot machines closely. This gives them aggregate information about player tendencies that they can use to push players’ psychological buttons.

For Example

Suppose a casino analyzes their slot machines’ hit ratios versus time spent on machine. They learn that the average time on the machines with a hit ratio of 30% is 90 minutes per game.

But on the machines with a hit ratio of 25%, the average time spent on average on each game is only 60 minutes.

The payback percentage can be adjusted to anything the casino wants, regardless of the hit percentage. You can have a slot machine with a hit percentage of 30% with an 85% payback percentage, but you can also have a slot machine with a hit percentage of 25% with the same 85% payback percentage. All the slot machine makers need to do is adjust the payback amounts and probabilities for the various combinations of symbols.

They don’t do this in any kind of short-term way.

But the longer they collect this kind of data, the more of it they have, and they’re becoming incredibly efficient at exploiting slot machine players’ psychological tendencies.

You have to decide if it’s smart to contribute to that.

5- Smart Slot Machine Players Learn How the Machines Work Before Playing

Maybe this should have been the first bullet point, but that other stuff is SO important, too.

Any fool can put money in a slot machine, press a button, and win or lose.

But what’s fun about that if you don’t know what you’re looking at?

Here’s one of the best slot tips you’ll ever find – If you really want to have fun on a slot machine, you need to understand what you’re doing.

Let’s start with the really basic stuff:

At most casinos, you can put money into the machine in various ways:

Cash
Coins
Payout tickets
Player cards

If you’re using cash, you can use almost any denomination you can think of, from $1 on up to $100.

Most modern slot machines don’t take coins anymore, but if you can find one, you just drop the money into the slot. (That’s where the games get their name, by the way.)

The payout tickets can be used just like cash in modern slot machines. You also use them when it’s time to cash out—you just take them to one of the machines that converts them into currency. When I started, you still got your winnings in coins. Those days are long gone.

You can use your player card to put money in the machine if you’ve been awarded rebates to your card in the form of credits.

No matter which method you use, the slot machine converts your money into credits on the machine. You can see how many credits you have in the machine at any time. The total is always prominently displayed. Depending on the game’s denomination, you might have trouble converting that amount to cash in your head. But the machine will do that for you when you cash out.

Some slot machine games include their pay tables on the machine itself, but others require you to access a screen via their touch-screen. (Look for an option labeled “HELP.”) The pay table lists the symbols along with what the payouts are for the various possible combinations of those symbols. It will also include information about where the pay lines are. These are the lines along the front of the machine where the symbol combinations occur.

This screen will also explain things like the bonus games, scatter symbols, and wild symbols.

Finally, you need to know where the CASH OUT button is. Don’t just sit there and play until all your money’s gone just because you can’t find the CASH OUT button. That really is crazy.

6- Smart Players Know that Denominations Can Be Misleading

You’ll hear a lot of people talk about “penny slots,” “nickel slots,” and “quarter slots.”

This does not mean that you’re betting a penny per spin, a nickel per spin, or a quarter per spin.

Most games encourage or force you to bet multiple coins per pay line, and you usually need to bet on multiple pay lines, too.

The most recent slot machine I played on was a penny slot called Lightning Sevens. It was a penny slot, but you had to bet 5 units per line to be eligible for the jackpots. (The game had 4 progressive jackpots, too.) The game also had 25 paylines.

As a result, I was betting $1.25 per spin on a penny slot machine.

This is another reason you should pay close attention to the HELP or INFO screen. On a lot of slot machine games, you can win the top jackpot even if you’re not betting max coins. But some games have lower payouts for the lower denominations.

It’s important to know the difference.

7- Smart Players Don’t Worry about the Locations of the Machines

One of the strategies you’ll often see touted on websites and in old books about playing slot machines is to try to play the games on the edges, nearest the walkways. The theory is that the casinos put the loosest machines there to attract more players to the games.

This might have been true at one casino at one time a long time ago.

But that’s almost certainly not true in a modern casino.

Casino managers probably employ some type of methodology related to the placement of their machines, but it’s probably subtle enough and complicated enough that you’ll never be able to use that logic to your advantage.

In fact, smart slot machine players don’t really worry about any kind of slot machine strategy at all. After all, the smarter you are, the more you realize that no slot machine strategy has any kind of validity at all. These games are entirely random.

You see, it’s worthwhile to study basic strategy in blackjack. It’s even worthwhile to learn how to count cards. Your decisions matter at the blackjack table—mathematically.

But on a slot machine, all you can do is put your money into the machine and hope for the best.

I’ve seen all kinds of silly advice that’s supposed to help you become a winner at the slot machines. For example, I read one author who said that if you get more than 7 spins in a row with no winners, you should switch machines. The same author suggests setting a percentage of your “session bankroll” as a win goal and a loss limit.

You’re then supposed to quit when you’ve won that much or when you’ve lost that much.

That kind of money management strategy doesn’t really matter, though. In the long run, you’re just playing one huge, almost infinite session. Arbitrarily taking breaks during your lifetime gambling session doesn’t increase your chances of winning.

The only way to do that is to only play slots once, get lucky, quit while you’re ahead, and never play again.

That’s a smart strategy in its way, but it’s a little limiting if you enjoy playing slot machines.

8- Smart Players Avoid the Biggest Progressive Slot Machines

A progressive slot machine is one which has an ever-increasing jackpot. These come in 3 varities:

Standalone progressives
In-house progressives
Wide area network progressives

A standalone progressive takes any bet that’s made on that machine and applies a small percentage of it toward its jackpot, which gets larger as a result.

Slot Machines Play For Fun

An in-house progressive is networked with other slot machines in the same casino. Any bet on any progressive in that in-house network increases the size of the jackpot for all those machines.

A wide area network progressive is a game that’s networked with multiple slot machines in multiple casinos. Any wager made on any machine in the network increases the size of the overall jackpot, which can increase its overall size.

Here’s why smart slot machine players tend to avoid such machines, though:

That tiny percentage that goes to fuel the jackpot comes out of the payback percentage. The full payback percentage on the machine isn’t fully realized until you’ve won it. In the case of the largest progressive jackpots, that might not happen ever.

Megabucks is the best known of the largest progressive jackpots. The jackpot starts at $10 million, and it’s not unusual for the jackpot to get as high as $20 million.

Learning How To Play Slot Machines

As you might guess, the probability of winning Megabucks is on a par with winning the lottery.

And we all know that smart gamblers don’t play the lottery, right?

The opposite of a progressive slot machine, by the way, is a “flat-top” machine. That’s a game where the jackpot is a flat dollar amount. It doesn’t change as the game is played.

Flat top machines generally have better payback percentages than progressive machines.

Conclusion

Let me be clear about this:

Learn To Play Slot Machines

Slot machines are always a negative expectation bet. No amount of smarts or strategy can help you overcome this mathematical edge.

Play Free Real Slot Machines

This doesn’t mean you can’t play slot machines like a smart person. You just need to do what a smart slot machine player does—treat the games as the entertainment devices that they are. Treat the money you wager on such machines as an entertainment expense.

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