How to play casino slot games

Many slot players pump money into two or more adjacent machines at a time, but if the casino is crowded and others are having difficulty finding places to play, limit yourself to one machine.

As a practical matter, even in a light crowd, it's wise not to play more machines than you can watch over easily. Play too many and you could find yourself in the situation faced by the woman who was working up and down a row of six slots. She was dropping coins into machine number six while number one, on the aisle, was paying a jackpot. There was nothing she could do as a passerby scooped a handful of coins out of the first tray.

Sometimes players taking a break for the restroom will tip a chair against the machine, leave a coat on the chair, or leave some other sign that they'll be back. Take heed of these signs. A nasty confrontation could follow if you play a machine that has already been staked out.

Payouts

Payout percentages, or the proportion of wagers returned to players as winnings, have risen since the casinos figured out it's more profitable to hold 5 percent of a dollar than 8 percent of a quarter or 10 percent of a nickel.

In most of the country, slot players can figure on about a 93 percent payout percentage, though payouts in Nevada run higher. Keep in mind that these are long-term averages that will hold up over a sample of , to , pulls.

In the short term, anything can happen. It's not unusual to go 20 or 50 or more pulls without a single payout on a reel-spinning slot, though payouts are more frequent on video slots. Nor is it unusual for a machine to pay back percent or more for several dozen pulls. But in the long run, the programmed percentages will hold up.

Stops

Since earlier slot machines were mechanical, if you knew the number of stops — symbols or blank spaces that could stop on the payout line — on each reel, you could calculate the odds on hitting the top jackpot. If a machine had three reels, each with ten stops, and one symbol on each reel was for the jackpot, then three jackpot symbols would line up, on the average, once every 10,, pulls, or 1, pulls.

On those machines, the big payoffs were $50 or $ — nothing like the big numbers slot players expect today. On systems that electronically link machines in several casinos, progressive jackpots reach millions of dollars.

The microprocessors driving today's machines are programmed with random-number generators that govern winning combinations. It no longer matters how many stops are on each reel.

If we fitted that old three-reel, ten-stop machine with a microprocessor, we could put ten jackpot symbols on the first reel, ten on the second, and nine on the third, and still program the random-number generator so that three jackpot symbols lined up only once every 1, times, or 10, times. And on video slots, reel strips can be programmed to be as long as needed to make the odds of the game hit at a desired percentage. They are not constrained by a physical reel.

Each possible combination is assigned a number or numbers. When the random-number generator receives a signal — anything from a button being pressed to the handle being pulled — it sets a number, and the reels stop on the corresponding combination.

Between signals, the random number generator operates continuously, running through dozens of numbers per second. This has two practical effects for slot players. First, if you leave a machine, then see someone else hit a jackpot shortly thereafter, don't fret. To hit the same jackpot, you would have needed the same split-second timing as the winner. The odds are overwhelming that if you had stayed at the machine, you would not have hit the same combination.

Second, because the combinations are random, or as close to random as is possible to set the program, the odds of hitting any particular combination are the same on every pull. If a machine is programmed to pay out its top jackpot, on the average, once every 10, pulls, your chances of hitting it are one in 10, on any given pull.

If you've been standing there for days and have played 10, times, the odds on the next pull will still be one in 10, Those odds are long-term averages. In the short term, the machine could go , pulls without letting loose of the big one, or it could pay it out twice in a row.