- How To Play The Slot Machine In Vegas
- How To Play The Slot Machines
- How To Play The Slot Machine Of The Dragon
- Free Slot Machine Play Buffalo
To win, the winning combination must appear on a line, as shown in the picture below. Most slots have multiple lines, and most let you choose how many lines you want to play. If you play just one line, it'll be the center row. If you play two lines, they'll be the top row and the center row. After you decide on a slot machine, then it is time to play. These are the basic rules of playing real casino slot machines (installed in land gambling halls) and online slots: Casino Slots. Buy special slot coins, chips, tickets or use slots club card. Choose an “appropriate” slot machine. Insert a coin into the slot machine.
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
![Play Play](https://www.scoopify.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Ways-to-play-the-slot-machine-games-1024x577.jpg)
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 ExampleSuppose 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. Play baccarat free.
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
How To Play The Slot Machine In Vegas
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.
How To Play The Slot Machines
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.
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.
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:
Slot machines are always a negative expectation bet. No amount of smarts or strategy can help you overcome this mathematical edge.
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.
Las Vegas slot machines are known by a variety of names around the world. Slot machines in Australia are generally referred to as video poker, poker machines or pokies. In Japan it is known as pachisuro. In Britain, they are usually known as Fruit machines, Bandits and AWP (Amusement with Prizes)
Traditional slot machines are coin-operated machines with three or more reels, which spin when a lever on the side of the machine is pulled.
Las Vegas slot machines which are considered modern slot machines are designed to look and feel like the old mechanical models, but they work on a completely different principle. The outcome of each pull is actually controlled by a central computer inside the machine, not by the motion of the reels.
The positions the reels will come to rest on are chosen by a Random Number Generator (RNG) contained in the machine's software. The RNG is constantly generating random numbers, at a rate of hundreds or maybe thousands per second. As soon as the lever is pulled or the 'Play' button is pressed, the most recent random number is used to determine the result. This means that the result varies depending on exactly when the game is played. A fraction of a second earlier or later, and the result would be different.
What does all this mean, you ask? It means,
Las Vegas slot machines have one of the worst House Advantage. That means the odds are always in the slot machine's favor.
There is no reward for playing longer. Each play is an independent event with the same odds of winning or losing as every other play on that game.
Persistence doesn't pay off. The result of your previous play or series of plays doesn't determine what happens on your next play.
There is no way to tell which slots are wining machines. Slots are never 'due for a win' and they don't 'go cold' after a win.
The location of the slot machine, whether it's on the Strip, off the Strip or Downtown affects the outcome of a game.
Las Vegas slot machines have one of the worst House Advantage. That means the odds are always in the slot machine's favor.
There is no reward for playing longer. Each play is an independent event with the same odds of winning or losing as every other play on that game.
Persistence doesn't pay off. The result of your previous play or series of plays doesn't determine what happens on your next play.
There is no way to tell which slots are wining machines. Slots are never 'due for a win' and they don't 'go cold' after a win.
The location of the slot machine, whether it's on the Strip, off the Strip or Downtown affects the outcome of a game.
Now, here is the news you don't to hear. There is really no strategy to out smart the slot machine. However what we can show you are some wining tips on playing slot machines.
One of the questions visitors to Las Vegas ask is, where are the loose slots. Loose slots are Slot machines with above-average pay outs.
It's a fact that Las Vegas Slots differ in their payouts. Generally the odds of wining any prize on Las Vegas Slot Machines are approximately 1 in 5. However the odds to wining a top prize on a red, white and blue slot machine, for example, are only 1 in 373,248.
Some slot games pay smaller prizes more frequently and offer more bonus games (Loose Slots). Other machines pay out more often in the middle and top prize categories. It's important to mention that the chances of winning smaller prizes on slots are greater than the chances of winning top prizes.
Tips for Wining Big on Slot Machines
Use your Player's club card
Play two-coin, three reel, one payline slot machines.
Stay away from three-coin machines unless they are progressive machines.
Don't play more than one machine at a time.
Always play the maximum coins.
Always play machines that show double up symbols.
Don't play nickel slot machines. (check the house advantage here)
Play two-coin, three reel, one payline slot machines.
Stay away from three-coin machines unless they are progressive machines.
Don't play more than one machine at a time.
Always play the maximum coins.
Always play machines that show double up symbols.
Don't play nickel slot machines. (check the house advantage here)
The Slot Expert's Guide to Winning at Slots
The Best Number of Coins to Play in Slots
Type of Machine | Rules and Reasons |
---|---|
Progressives | Play maximum coins. If you play don't play maximumcoins, you're only increasing the jackpot for someone else with nochance of winning it yourself. |
Straight Multipliers | Play one coin at a time. The payback and hitfrequency are the same regardless of the number of coins you play. |
Bonus Multipliers | Play one coin at a time. The chances of hitting apayout with a bonus are so small, it's not worth the extra risk. |
Buy-A-Pays | Play maximum coins. The increase in payback andhit frequency purchased by the additional coins can turn a terriblemachine into a good one. |
Hybrids | Play just enough coins to activate all winningcombinations. Extra coins are rarely worth playing in amultiplier, and hybrids are multipliers when you're in themultiplying section of the paytable. |
Hidden Buy-A-Pays | Play maximum coins. The feature activated byplaying the last coin frequently makes the last coin pay back over100%. |
Multilines | Play one coin or maximum coins. Play maximum coinsif having winning combinations land on paylines you didn't activatebothers you, otherwise play one coin. |
Multicoin/Multilines | Play one coin each on as many lines as you like. Play one coin on each line if having winning combinations land onpaylines you didn't activate bothers you, otherwise play one coin.If there's a Hidden Buy-A-Pay, play enough coins to activate it. |
Source: John Robison - www.Robison.CasinoCityTimes.com
How To Play The Slot Machine Of The Dragon
Slots Machines House Advantage and Expected Lose
House Advantage | For Every $100 bet, the player can expect to lose | |
---|---|---|
Penny Slots | 8%-12% | $8 - $12 |
Nickel Slots | 6%-12% | $6 - $12 |
Quarter Slots | 5%-10% | $5 -$10 |
Dollar Slots | 2.5%-6% | $2.50 -$6 |
Take a different twist on the increasingly popular game of poker and play your favorite video reel games at most Las Vegas Casinos. Choose from the hottest Vegas video reel games and slot machines. You'll find all your favorites, plus progressives and video poker in a wide range of denominations. Video poker provides all the strategy of poker but at your own pace.
Did you know..
The largest Las Vegas slot machine jackpot ever, was paid on a Megabucks machine at the Excalibur Hotel, for $39,713,982.25 on March 21, 2003. More Las Vegas Facts.
The largest Las Vegas slot machine jackpot ever, was paid on a Megabucks machine at the Excalibur Hotel, for $39,713,982.25 on March 21, 2003. More Las Vegas Facts.
Free Slot Machine Play Buffalo
Do you know .. your chances of hitting a winning combination are the same on every spin.