Slots, hummmm. What Are The Odds?

It’s still night on the strip in Las Vegas; you’re a little buzzed, you know the sun will be up in a couple hours , but you’re still up and on the prowl for that perfect slot machine. The one with your big payout waiting inside it’s metal belly. The one that’s going to turn your luck around tonight.

You stumble though the door at the Wynn and you are instantly hit by the sounds of loud bells “ding, ding ding, ding, ding,” flashing lights and the sound of coins pouring into large meta troths; someone has just won the jackpot! $100,000 bucks — those lucky bastards! But it wakes you up and suddenly remember something you once read in one of your “How To Win In Vegas” books. Casino’s like to place big paying slot machines near the door so more please see people wining and want to play there. It makes you think back, “yes” you say to yourself ” I have seen a lot of people by win and I think mostly they were near the front of the casino…”

Is that fact or fiction? Fiction of course. Slots are totally random and are based on a set payback percentage set by the casino; generally in the 90 – 98 percent range, there are lower. There aren’t many higher.

The best thing you can hope for is the casino actually listing their payback percentage, well at least in terms more useful than “up to”. In Vegas and nearly all other casino’s in the US (I can really speak for other countries as I have never played, nor done the research to find out. This a fact in psychical casino’s, but when it comes to the Best Online Casino. Online Casinos have become extremely competitive so as a way to get more people playing the have started displaying their payback percentage . Not only do they show you, they compete on those percentages, so you have a fair idea of what you are getting into before playing. See our Online Casino Reviews for information on the best paying online casinos.

When it comes down to the mathematics of Slot odd, it gets quite indepth, Below I will go into details, but for those of you who don’t want to read that much it pretty much breakdown like this:

If we imagine that there are 10 different symbols on one reel and that the slot machine has three reels, then the odds to hit the same symbol one every reel on an active pay-line is 1 on 1.000 (10^3). With a 5 reels video slot the odds to get a jackpot are even less, 1 on 100.000 (10^5).

Here’s a deeper and more detailed example:

Lets assume this is a standard three reel electromechanical

slot machine with the following payoff table based on the centre line:

There seems to be always 22 actual

stops on each reel of a slot machine. The following table shows the symbol

on each stop as well as the weight.

There are two interesting things to note at this point. First notice that

the first reel is weight the most generously and the third is the least.

For example the bar has 4 weights on reel 1 and only 1 weight on reel

3. Second notice the high number of blanks directly above and below the

bar symbol. This results in a near miss effect.

Most of the symbols occur twice on the reel,

and the blank 11 times. The following table shows the total number of

weights of each kind of symbol.

Given the two table of weights and the paytable it only takes simple math

to calculate the expected return. Following are the specific probabilities

of each paying combination. Note that each virtual reel has a total of

64 stops so the total number of possible combinations is 643 = 262,144.

3 Bars: 4*3*1/262,144 = 0.000046

3 Cherries: 5*4*2/262,144 = 0.000153

3 Plums: 6*4*3/262,144 = 0.000275

3 Watermelons: 6*5*4/262,144 = 0.000458

3 Oranges: 7*5*6/262,144 = 0.000801

3 Lemons: 8*6*6/262,144 = 0.001099

2 Cherries: (5*4*62 + 5*60*2 + 59*4*2)/262,144 = 0.008820

1 Cherry: (5*60*62 + 59*4*62 + 59*60*2)/262,144 = 0.153778

The average return of the machine is the dot product of the above probabilities

and their respective payoffs:

0.000046*5000 + 0.000153*1000 + 0.000275*200 + 0.000458*100 + 0.000801*50

+ 0.001099*25 + 0.008820*10 + 0.153778*2 = 0.94545 .

Thus for every unit played the machine will return back 94.545%.

Courtesy of WizardofOdds

So as you can see there really isn’t a way to beat the odds, its totally random. If you are going to play slots, remember that fact and play with the right knowledge, not the rumors you hear.

Now go forth and play.

Maybe next time i’ll write about poker, and other table game odds, which are better.