Are Slot Machine Strategies Really For Reel?

Nothing ever invented is as popular among gamblers as slot machines. In online casinos and offline casinos, in the U.S. and most of the world's other countries, more people play the slots than play all the table games combined. More people play the slots than bet on sports.

About the only forms of gambling which may draw more bettors are state lotteries. And even in that case, in states where slots are legal they get more play per person than the lottery. After all, a lottery player may buy only one ticket, or ten tickets or even 20 tickets, but how many slot players can stop after just one, ten or 20 pulls of the handle or pushes of the "play" button? Surely, there must be strategies to increase bettors' odd on gaming devices that are so universally popular and draw so much action. There have to be people who've devoted their lives to figuring out how to beat the house on slot machines, right? Indeed there have been and a great many of them, the ones whose systems didn't involve magnets and drills and similar mechanical devices, aren't even in jail. Whether any of them ever got rich by what is sometimes called "skilling the machine" is another matter.

Slot machines, be they online casino slots or live casino slots, video poker or video keno games (they're all really slot machines, the "slot" refers to where the money goes), are the most paradoxical of gaming devices subject, as they are, to two seemingly conflicting mathematical laws.

The first rule is the law of random chance, which says that if you have, for example, a deck of 52 cards and you pull one - say, a two of spades - reshuffle and pull again, the odds of your getting the two of spades a second time are exactly the same as they were the first time. The second law is the law of probability. In the above example, the law of probability would postulate that the same card would rarely, if ever, come up twice in a row.

To understand the conflict here, you have to consider what a slot machine is. Originally, it was a device with three reels decorated with strawberries, liberty bells, dollar signs, lemons, and other icons. The number of times each image was painted on each reel determined the odds of any particular combination coming up. As casino gambling became more competitive, operators fighting for customers decided to radically increase the size of slot machine jackpots. The problem was that with the limited number of spots available on the reels it was impossible to create odds long enough to justify, say, a $20,000 payout - people would hit it so often the house would go broke.

The first cure was the addition of more reels, but that made the machines bigger and limited how many could be fit in a room. So the reels were scrapped in favor of rolls, long strips of celluloid that wrapped around pulleys and rollers and were capable of holding hundreds of icons. From there, operators began offering huge progressive jackpots. After awhile, the also made the ultimate payoff dependent on getting the winning combination on multiple lines simultaneously, which not only changed the odds but increased the earning power of each machine by allowing people to bet on more than one line. (Multiple betting on one line was also introduced for the same purpose.)

With the advent of electronic slots, the determination of how often a winning combination turns up was taken over by computer chips, but the principle is the same. Because the machines have no memory, they treat each new "spin" as if it was the first. Mathematically the odds of winning should be the same each time. Or at least they should according to one theory. But there's another theory and if you hunt around the Web - or talk to old-timers in any gambling town - you'll find many discussions of it, some complete with elaborate betting schemes alleged to take advantage of it. And that theory is based on the law of probability -- most often expressed as: That machine is long overdue. According to this theory, the likelihood of a machine paying off goes up with each unsuccessful spin.

This theory, as it happens, is more or less true - at least in regard to small payouts. Operators - online and offline - set their slot machines to return a given amount to bettors in the form of winnings. They have to do this because if they didn't no one would play - while people will gamble on long shots, they won't bet on sure losers, there has to be the opportunity to win.

Because people talk, around town and in casinos in cities like Las Vegas and in chat rooms and news groups on the Web, word about which gambling emporium has the "loosest" (most generous) slots gets around fast, which means that slot payouts are generally quite liberal, sometimes well in excess of 90 percent. With a 90 percent payout, every million bucks fed into a casino's slot machines will theoretically make $100,000 for the casino and $900,000 to the players. Obviously, the largess is not evenly distributed … some people bet $1000 and lose it all, some bet one dollar and win a $1,000 jackpot. That's one of the major appeals of slot machines, the ability to recoup your losses and earn substantial winnings with one spin of the reels and without increasing your bet. Go down $100 on a $2 blackjack table and you either have to risk much more than $2 a hand or win 50 times to get even.

So, to make a long story short, if you play the same machine for a week you should wind up with roughly what you started with give or take 10 or 15 percent. Unless you hit a big progressive jackpot somewhere along the way and retire to the south of France. Except … except … slot machines are only human. Some pay off more often than others. Often there's a logical explanation - machines fronting the sidewalk on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, for example, are set to return a higher percentage than those inside the casino - the cascading coins and ringing bells are believed to be a potent lure to passersby. Frequently, however, there is no logical reason. For whatever reason, a microscopic imperfection in a bit of silicone or a programming error, two identical machines standing next to each other will pay off at entirely different intervals. One might show a winning combination of some sort every 10th spin, the other every 200th.

So my strategy is simple, I logon to a casino with the amount I'm going to spend on slots mentally divided into four parts. I pick a machine and start playing, if I win a few times I continue to play that machine until I decide to quit while I'm ahead (which, sadly, I rarely do) or blow my winnings. If 25 percent of what I've planned to gamble goes into the machine without any decent returns, I quit, move to another machine and repeat the process. I don't always find a machine that will give me a good run for my money, but more often than not, I do. And for most of us who gamble, a good run for our money is exactly what we're looking for.