Modern slot machines use a computer to generate random numbers, and these determine the outcomes of the game. The important thing to remember is that the results are truly random. The game doesn’t work on any kind of cyclical basis, and slot machine jackpots. Slot machine video from casino expert Steve Bourie that teaches you the insider secrets to winning at slot machines and how a slot machine really works. Slot Machines and Psychology. A machine that just takes money and does nothing else would unlikely succeed, so the way slot machines have worked around that hurdle is offering a theoretical chance to win money, even if you lose money on the machine in the long run. And that chance makes people play the machines.

If you’re going to play slot machines, you should understand how slot machines work.

That sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many people have no idea how these games really work.

In this post I explain how slot machines work in simple terms that anyone can understand.

What Is a Slot Machine?

Real money slot machines are the basic gambling machine at most casinos, and slot machines generate 70% to 80% of most casinos’ revenue. In some casinos, they make up even more than that. They’re called slot machines because you used to put coins in a slot to play them.

Slot machines differ from other gambling machines because of the way the outcomes are generated. A video poker game is also a gambling machine, but it’s not a SLOT machine. Neither is a video blackjack game.

What makes a slot machine game a slot machine game are the spinning reels.

In early mechanical versions of the games, you literally had big metal reels powered by springs and levers. They spun and landed on various stopping points when the kinetic energy that caused them to spin was all faded.

Modern slot machines use a computer program to determine the outcomes. The spinning reels are just for show, even on machines that LOOK like they’re using physical reels.

But many – if not most – modern slot machines just use a computer monitor with animated reels to determine outcomes.

How Does a Slot Machine Come Up With a Random Result?

Modern slot machines used a computer program to determine the outcomes. This program is called a “random number generator” or “RNG.”

Here’s how the random number generator works:

It constantly “thinks” of a range of numbers. Each number corresponds to a combination of symbols on the slot machine reels and the payline. When you press the spin button, the random number generator stops on that combination.

But with a computer program, you could easily have a symbol that comes up once every 20 spins, another that comes up once every 5 spins, and another that comes up once very 10 spins.

These changes in probability can even happen from one identical machine sitting next to the other.

I’ll have more to say about that in this next point:

How Slot Machines Make Money for the Casino

All casino games give the house a mathematical edge. This is usually based on something simple – in blackjack, for example, the player has to play her hand first. In roulette, you have two green numbers, but the payout odds would be break-even if all the numbers were black or red.

With a slot machine, the house makes its money simply by paying out at lower odds than the odds of winning.

Each prize amount on a slot machine has a probability of happening. When you multiply that probability by the prize amount, you come up with the “return” for that combination.

Add all those returns together, and you get the total return for the machine.

That return is always less than 100%.

Here’s an example:

You might have a 55% probability of getting no win at all. This would apply to all non-winning combinations, so the return for any of the non-winning combinations would be 55% X 0, or 0.

You might have a 20% probability of getting a single cherry symbol that doesn’t match anything else on the machine, and that might pay off at even money (1 for 1). The return for a cherry-blank-blank combination would be 20% X 1, or 20%.

You then might have another 20% probability of getting a 2 for 1 payoff for any combination that includes a bar symbol and no other matches. The return for a bar-blank-blank combination would be 20% X 2, or 40%.

If you had no other combinations, the overall return on this game would be 40% + 20% + 0%, or 60%.

This means that on average, over a staggeringly large number of spins, you’d wind up getting back 60% of the money you bet.

At $3 per spin over 1000 spins, you’d have bet a total of $3000.

The odds say that you would have gotten $1800 in winnings, for a loss of $1200.

Of course, a real slot machine pay table would have more than three possible prizes, and at least one of those prizes would be large. The average slot machine has a 1000 for 1 jackpot for its top prize.

How Do Bonus Games and Other Slot Machine Features Work?

Modern slot machines have a staggering array of special features, too. One of the most prominent of these features are the slot machine bonus games.

Here’s how that works:

Some combinations of symbols result in a mini-game that you get to play. It’s called a bonus game. It might be as simple as getting 10 free spins, each of which is guaranteed a winner. It might be more involved, like getting to play a Space Invaders type game where each alien you shoot has a prize amount associated with it.

Scatter symbols are also popular. A scatter symbol is a symbol that triggers some kind of payout regardless of where it appears on the screen.

The 8-liners in Texas are a good example. A screen has three rows of symbols, for a 3X3 grid. It’s called an 8-liner because there are eight paylines.

You have three horizontal paylines, three vertical paylines, and two diagonal paylines.

You must activate each payline with a bet, and it’s possible to win multiple prizes on multiple paylines.

Think of paylines as being similar to the various patterns that bingo variants have.

Scatter symbols trigger wins regardless of where it is on the screen.

Wild symbols are also popular. These are symbols which can fill in for another symbol that you would need to trigger a win on that payline.

If you play poker, you’re probably already familiar with the concept of wild cards. Just apply that concept to slot machines, and you understand how it works.

These are just a handful of the special features that are now available on modern slot machine games.

How Do You Win at Slots?

I wish I had a foolproof winning strategy for slot machines that I could share with you.

But I don’t.

No one else does, either, regardless of what they claim.

Slot machines are entirely random. You put your money in, and you take your chances. The only way to win on a slot machine is to get lucky.

You’ll find plenty of looney strategies that are supposed to improve your probability of winning. They’re all equally worthless.

One example is to find slot machine games on the edges of the banks near the walkways. The idea is that the casino managers want to attract players to the slot machines, and they do this by putting the looser games near the walkways.

Of course, this isn’t true in modern casinos. Even if it were true, it wouldn’t mean you were going to beat the casino. Such games would still have a mathematical edge for the house that you couldn’t overcome in the long run.

Another popular strategy I see touted is to look for hot or cold machines. A hot machine is one that has paid out several times in a row. The idea is that the game has gotten hot and is going to keep paying out.

A cold machine, on the other hand, is one that hasn’t paid out in a while.

If you have a 1 in 1500 probability of winning the top prize on a slot machine, that probability is the same regardless of whether the jackpot got hit on the previous spin.

It seems intuitive to think that if you just hit the jackpot, the probability of hitting it again on the next spin would be lower.

How Does The Slot Machine Work

But that’s not the case.

It’s still 1 in 1500.

If you’re going to play slot machines, go into it with you eyes open and understand that it’s going to cost you money in the long run.

Don’t fall for lame, looney slot machine strategies.

Conclusion

Slot machines can be a lot of fun, but they’re like other casino games:

They’re more fun if you have some understanding of how they work.

After reading this post, you’re better educated that at least 80% of the slot machine playing public.

A slot machine simply takes a dollar and gives 80-98 cents back (it's rare to find a slot machine with a payback of over 98%).

But, of course, it does this in the long run.

Since playing slot machines seems insane on paper, what makes slot players spend so much money on these machines that are often referred to as one-armed bandits?

That'll be all the psychological factors.

Slot Machines and Psychology

A machine that just takes money and does nothing else would unlikely succeed, so the way slot machines have worked around that hurdle is offering a theoretical chance to win money, even if you lose money on the machine in the long run.

And that chance makes people play the machines. First of all, who wouldn't want to win a lot of money for basically doing nothing? That's appealing even if the odds were against you.

Additionally, people rarely realize just how much of a house edge slot machines have, and how much better it would be to play games like blackjack with optimal strategy.

Usually, the bigger the jackpot, the more players are willing to play the machine. After all, what's $50 spent on a machine that may give you a life-changing sum of money? (Co-incidentally, progressive jackpot slots, the ones that have more than a million dollars in jackpot prizes, give you the worst winning odds.)

How Do Slots Work

Our desire to win big-time allows slot machines to play another psychological trick on us: the near-miss situations, which happen because slot machine reels are weighted differently (more about that lower on this page). It encourages us to keep on playing since we 'came so close' to winning life-changing money.

At live casinos, the most popular slot machines are often placed in the places where most people can see them. This takes an advantage of a psychological tendency called Social Proof (or as I like to call it, 'monkey see, monkey do'). Some say that casinos even place the machines with the highest hit frequency to where everyone can see them - I find this believable, but I have no proof.

Seeing lots of others play and win is one heck of a psychological trick. The sound of winning that a slot machine makes is affiliated deep in our mind with something positive, as is the sound of coins clinging and clanging against the metal disposer of the machine (the sound of money!). It's easy to see why someone walking in to space like that would be hooked.

So I thought it would be important to understand how slot machines work from a psychological point-of-view first - since psychological factors are what make us play slot machines - and now that you understand the basics of slot machine psychology, let's move on to the technical aspects.

Random Numbers and Paytables

When someone believes in a slot machine's hot and cold streaks, it's called Gambler's Fallacy, and for a good reason. 'Hot' streaks happen, 'cold' streaks happen in the sense that sometimes, when numbers are chosen randomly, they happen to be of similar sort for X times in a row.

It's like receiving pocket aces twice in a row at poker - it's unlikely (in fact, there's a X% chance it happens) but it does happen sometimes. Does that mean the deck of cards is 'hot'? Or when you flip a coin and you get heads five times in a row, is the coin 'hot'?

Of course not. When things happen at random, they do. They're unpredictable. Anything can happen, and at some point probably will happen.

But the point is, you have no way of knowing what the future holds for a slot machine. Every spin of the reels is an independent trial, which means the previous game has no influence on the next game. Everything starts over and the chances of winning are the same with each spin of the reels, regardless of whether someone's lost ten spins in a row or just hit a jackpot.

Why would anyone design slot machines that get 'hot' or 'cold' anyway? If they did, players could tell when to play and when not to play. It makes no sense. Casinos are much better off creating slot machines to which there are no 'winning systems' available.

How Does The Slot Machine Dancing Drums Work

So slot machines use a random number generator (from now on referred to as 'RNG') to, well, generate random numbers for each reel. These numbers are between one and a couple of billions (let's just say a lot of numbers).

And there's a symbol assigned to each number - for example, if the RNG would pick numbers between one and a billion, the game had ten symbols and each were as likely to come, there would be a 100 million numbers assigned to each of the symbols.

But lot machine symbols are never equally likely to come; the ones that pay the most are the hardest to get. Therefore different symbols have a different amount of numbers assigned to them. (The odds of winning the Megabucks jackpot are somewhere in the one out of 50,000,000.)

But the point is, the RNG assigns numbers to each reel and those numbers correspond with symbols that have been assigned to them. The RNG is not influenced by previous results; it deals a new, random set of numbers with every spin, regardless of what's happened.

Interestingly, the moment you press Spin or pull the lever, your fate has already been sealed. Spinning reels stopping one by one is just theatrics; they make the game more exciting and enjoyable.

Now, the slot machine must also know which symbol combinations are winners and how much they pay. For this, slot machines use EPROM chips. They tell the slot machine winning combinations and define the paytable.

How Does Dancing Drums Slot Machine Work

When a casino wants to change the payback of a machine, they change the EPROM chip (or the settings of the chip). Not long ago casinos had to physically change the chip which was quite a bit of work, but now many casinos can change the settings of the chip externally.

There are rules, though. In Nevada, for example, casinos aren't allowed to change the settings four minutes before and after someone has played; this eliminates the myth that casinos change the settings while you're playing.

How Does Online Slot Machine Work

So either someone physically changes the chip or there has to be a four minute time window before and after someone's played. (While the settings are being changed, the slot machine screen should have a message stating that some sort of 'configuration' is happening.)

That's pretty much it. There are a lot of psychologal tricks involved, but technically the RNG assigns random numbers to each reel and the EPROM chip determines the winning combinations and paytables, which together determine the payback (or 'return') of the machine. The less it pays back, the more you're going to lose on the machine in the long run.

More About the Subject:

How Does Slot Machine Betting Work

• Vegas Click: Michael Bluejay's comprehensive explanation of how slot machines work. In my opinion, the best one out there.
• Wizard of Odds: Michael Shackleford's slot machine advice -- the site also features an extensive FAQ section for slots.
• Gambling Captain: If you're looking for a short but insightful read on the basics of slots (or other casino games), this is a good site to visit.