The secrets to winning on Slot machines are not easy to uncover, especially since Casinos don't want you to know them. Most players don't even care to learn how to win on Casino Slots. They think they do, but they are not ready to commit to that and to put in what's needed to succeed. Its results are determined by Random Number Generators, which means that there is not really anything you can do (skills wise) to beat the machines. Your best bet would be to figure out which machines offer better odds. Choose Slots with Higher Payouts. In order to win at slots, you need to find the slots that tend to pay out more than others.
First of all you should know that slot machines, as with many casino games, are a type of game for which there is no “winning strategy” - technically speaking they are a negative equity game, or –EV game for short. Unlike a game such as poker (against real opponents, not vs. the house) where proper application of skill can make a game profitable in the long-term, most casino games are designed to make this impossible.
Why Can’t I make a Consistent Return at Slots?
Let’s look at why, in the case of slots, there’s no way to make money long-term. For simplicity let’s imagine a game where there is only one pay-out, the “jackpot”, paid out for matching five symbols, of course the same logic will apply to complex modern machines as well. In this hypothetical machine there are five symbols available on each line and you need to match five of the same to win the jackpot on a $1 machine.
The lines are controlled by random number generators, and over time the five different symbols will come up equally often on each line. So the chance of hitting, say a cherry on one line is 1/5. The chance of hitting a cherry on the second line is also 1/5. Therefore the chance of hitting five cherries in a row is 1/5 x 1/5 x 1/5 x 1/5 x 1/5, or 1/3125, or 0.032%. Your odds of winning are better than this, as you can hit five bells, five whistles or five of any other set of symbols, so on this machine your odds of any set of five are actually 5 x 0.032%, or 0.16%. So once in every 625 spins of this hypothetical machine, you’ll hit your set of five identical symbols for the jackpot.
Now if the jackpot payout was $625, the machine would be a break-even proposition, as on average you’d pay $1 624 times without winning anything, and then you’d hit once in every 625 spins for the $625 prize, breaking even overall. Of course pay-outs are set by the casinos at a slightly lower figure, usually between 90% and 98% of this frequency, so for example if this imaginary machine was set for 95% pay-outs, the jackpot would actually be $594.
Of course you can get lucky and hit jackpot on your second spin, walk away and keep the money, technically making a profit. But long-term there’s no way to beat the law of averages, and the house edge will be sustained over any short-term variance in results. Rarely, certain machines are reported as paying out just above 100% over a given month, but this is again just the variance inherent in randomness, and will not be sustained over larger samples.
There’s a very nice little piece of software providing virtual testing of this principle, to be found here at Vegas Click. It simulates the return over one wager, over ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand and a hundred thousand wagers, of a bet subject to a house edge, and shows the returns expected in each simulation. Try it out for yourself - it’s cheaper than going to Vegas!
A slot machine house edge is known by casino managers as the “hold”, and hold percentages vary a great deal, and do tend to be smaller at more expensive slots, frequently found to be around 1- 3% at the five dollar slots. Of course, percentage of investment lost is not a real money figure, and you’ll still tend to lose more money in real terms at the more expensive machines, since you’re putting far more money through the machine each hour.
Why Play if There’s a House Edge?
Certainly you shouldn’t be playing in order to try to make sustainable returns. Of course many people enjoy the thrill of a gamble, even if they know or merely suspect that it’s a negative equity investment of their money. Of course, there’s always the chance you may get lucky, even astoundingly so, as some winners of multi-million dollar slots jackpots can certainly attest to. There’s also the enjoyment factor, and playing slots can be a cheap form of entertainment if you stick to a budget and if you actually do genuinely enjoy it!
What is the Exact Edge on a Particular Machine?
There’s an easy answer to this one – you frequently can’t find out. Certainly it’s against a casino’s interests to publish this information on the front of a machine, and I’m sure many gambling-happy players don’t even realise there is a real house edge, nor know the difference between a game of skill and one of pure luck. Monthly and annual reports are regularly published of the actual pay-outs for given machines, so do your research and you could get a good idea.
Certain states in the US require the pay-outs to be in a certain range (typically above 80%), and this can be discovered with a bit of trawling through your state’s gambling laws. For example in Nevada, the gaming board states that the machines must have a RTP of 73% while in Mississippi, it is 80%.
A good rule of thumb is that higher cost games tend to have a smaller house hold percentage, but it’s likely to always be at least 1-3 %.
You might also want to consider your likely loss over an hour of play at different denominations.
Busting Slot Machine Myths
As with many a casino game, myths and falsehoods abound, and there are many people who think they have a stone cold strategy for beating slots and other casino games. These people are usually either lying, or deluded. If they’re trying to sell you a system, it’s most likely the former. Unless you have some kind of technology which can control or damage a slot machine directly, you can’t beat the machine long-term.
Of course anything along those lines would be straight up cheating. There’s no wagering system which will allow you to beat the house edge in slots, although there are systems which will allow you to lose the minimum – with slots this essentially comes down to choosing machines found to have a smaller hold percentage, and playing maximum wagers at all times, to enable you to at least hit the full jackpot when your luck does come around.
Many people believe that machines run on hot and cold cycles. This is a myth, random number generators are programmed to function on individual spins, and there is no “machine memory” of previous spins, each one being an isolated event. The same principle applies to tossing a coin. Throwing ten heads in a row doesn’t increase the chance of hitting tails the next time. Each throw is an individual probabilistic event, 50/50 with a true coin.
One myth with a modicum of truth to it is that the casino can alter pay-outs and other factors remotely. While untrue in the vast majority of cases, server controlled machines are gaining in popularity amongst casinos, although many establishments have rules about how and when settings can be changed, usually this only occurs between bouts of play, and a message should generally appear on the screen during the process, stating that remote control is in progress. For a non-server controlled machine to be altered in any way would involve physically opening the machine up and amending the EPROM chip within.
Further Advice for Playing Slots
Some games do feature a skill bonus round or skill component which can improve your odds. Of course these are also set up so as not to obliterate the house edge, so they aren’t going to be sufficient to give you a real long-term return, but the advice on how to play these rounds offered by the machines should usually be adhered to for maximum benefit.
Finally if you’re playing for fun (really the only reason to play slots), play slowly. You’ll save money.
A lot of people might think of slot machine cheats and cheaters as the people who have figured out a way to beat the games. I tend to think of them as people who CLAIM to have figured out a way to beat the games. Then again, I guess both categories could be considered cheaters.
Real Slot Machine Cheats
Real slot machine cheats use devices to get payouts when they otherwise shouldn’t. These devices often have clever, colorful names, like the “light wand” or “the monkey’s paw”. The former sounds like something you might find in a Star Wars movie, while the latter obviously brings up literary connotations. (“The Monkey’s Paw” is a well-known short story by W.W. Jacobs, about a paw of a dead monkey, which grants its owner wishes. Things end badly.
Tommy Glenn Carmichael is the most famous of these cheaters. Of course, he’s in his 60s now, and he’s retired from the cheating game. Like many former con-men, he’s turned his past as a less-than-honest-but-clever-confidence-man into a profitable career as a consultant for the people and businesses he used to swindle.
Carmichael was in the slot machine cheating business for over 20 years. 30 years ago, when Carmichael got started, the state-of-the-art slot machine cheating tool was a “top-bottom joint”, which is just a piece of metal that slides into the coin release slot. This triggers un-earned payouts in massive amounts—or at least it did in 1980. Modern slot machines don’t usually pay out in real coins anyway, and the manufacturers caught onto that trick years ago.
That didn’t even slow Carmichael down, though. He was caught cheating early in his career, but he used his 5 years in jail to learn about (and invent) other cheating techniques and tools. His approach to figuring out ways to beat a slot machine was simplicity itself. He would buy a machine, take it apart, and think about how the machine paid out money from a mechanical perspective. Then it was usually easy to come up with ideas like the monkey’s paw, which was actually just some springs and guitar wire that, used correctly, would trigger the machine to payout a massive bunch of coins.
Online Slot Machine Cheats
Cheaters online spend their time cheating players out of their money, not the casinos. And these cheaters aren’t casinos, either—they’re ebook authors. They claim to have all kinds of inside information about how slot machines work, and they sell this information for ungodly amounts of money.
The problem is that the information they’re selling is worthless and inaccurate. It’s not even worth buying for its entertainment value. Some of these “unbeatable” tips worked years ago, but none of them apply to today’s electronic and computerized slot machine games.
One example is a book that claims to help you win at slots consistently by explaining “betting concepts and spending habits”. It also claims to help you apply your common sense regarding slot machine decision making.
Here’s what my common sense tells me. Slot machines are entirely random. I don’t get to make many decisions at all. I can decide which machine to play, if any, and I can decide how much to gamble. But none of that is going to help me become a winner on a consistent basis, and the reason is simple:
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A slot machine is a negative expectation game.
What does that mean?
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It’s simple, really. A negative expectation game is one in which you stand to lose more than the odds of winning suggest. For example, if you and I played a simple game where you flipped a coin, and I won if you got heads, and you won if you got tails, and the winner got the quarter, we’d be playing a fair, heads-up, even-money game. The odds of winning are 1 to 1, and the payout is also 1 to 1.
But suppose we tweak the rules? Let’s say that if you win 2 quarter every time you get tails, but I win 1 quarter every time I get heads, then you’d have a positive expectation situation, and I would have a negative expectation situation.
That’s exactly the kind of math that applies to all casino games (except in certain rare situations). The casino always pays out your win at less than the odds of winning, which guarantees them a long term profit.
Common sense doesn’t increase your chances of winning. Neither does any combination of betting concepts and spending habits. Usually these types of books suggest setting a win goal and a loss limit for each session. While that might be an entertaining way of managing your bankroll, it does nothing for your long term expectation.
The Pros and Cons of Being a Cheater
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The pros of being either kind of cheater are obvious. You’ll either win money or get money from a sucker. If money is all you care about, then being a slots cheat might be the perfect career for you to pursue.
The cons of being a cheat shouldn’t be underestimated though. Aside from the karmic implications, physically cheating at any gambling game in a major casino destination is a felony. If you get caught — and let’s face it, you probably will — you can plan on a lengthy probation and probably at least a little bit of jail time. If you get caught more than once, you can rest assured you’ll spend plenty of time in jail.
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And if you have hopes of becoming a highly-paid consultant when you finish doing your time, well…ask Tommy Glenn Carmichael if the time he spent behind bars was worth gaining a career as a consultant. My guess is that he’d rather have had his freedom during those years.