How To Find A Good Slot Machine In A Casino

 


Slot machines generate more profit for a casino than the other casino games by a wide margin. And what’s good for the casino’s bottom line is NOT what’s good for your bottom line.

I sometimes recommend avoiding slot machines altogether and just sticking with table games, because the amount of money you’re mathematically expected to lose is dramatically lower when playing table games.

Wait for an old lady to leave a machine and take it; local seniors know the best slots! None of these are reliable ways to choose a good game. Winning slot machines really is more of a science, thankfully. How to Pick the Right Slot Machine. For the most part, I’m going to focus on live casino slots; those located in a real, physical casino.

But some people love taking a shot at a big jackpot. For players who want to risk a small amount for a potentially life-changing jackpot, I offer the following tips for how to pick a good slot machine.

Try to Find a High-Denomination Slot Machine You Can Afford

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  2. Aug 07, 2020 The casino slot machines you find at the best online casinos come with a unique return to play (RTP) percentages. This is what determines the odds of whether your gambling session will be profitable. The higher the slots payout rate, the lower the house edge. This means you will stand a better chance of winning if you chose to play such slots.

Don’t be fooled by the ubiquitous nature of penny slots. Since those games usually require you to bet on multiple lines at one time, you’re often betting far more than just a penny per spin. In fact, it’s impossible to bet a penny per spin on such a game.

Often, even on a penny slot machine, you’re risking $1.00 or more to spin. On the other hand, if you were just playing a dollar slot machine to begin with, you’d be playing a game with a lower house edge.

If you spend some time looking at the payback percentage surveys for Las Vegas casinos, one thing will become clear quickly…

The lower denomination machines have a much lower payback percentage than the higher dollar machines.

I’m NOT, however, suggesting you gamble a lot per spin. You should bet as little as possible while still keeping the game interesting for yourself.

In the long run, the more you bet per spin combined with how long you play is going to determine how much you’re going to lose—not IF you’re going to lose, but HOW MUCH.

That’s an important thing to remember about all casino gambling games. No matter which ones you choose, you’ll lose more the longer you play.

Think Old School

The newer the slot machine game is, the more bells and whistles it has. And those bells and whistles all have a cost in the form of a lower payback percentage.

Here’s an example:

On an old-school slot machine with three mechanical-looking reels, you win if you line up three symbols across the center line. That’s simple enough.

But on a modern slot machine with five virtual reels and visible lines five above and five below, some of the symbols trigger bonus games.

Those bonus games are fun and generate winnings, but they don’t come up often. When they do, they don’t pay out as much as you’d think.

When you include wild symbols, multiple paylines, and the bonus games, the payback percentage for a game like this is often much lower than it would be on an old-fashioned, “electro-mechanical” slot machine game.

Boring is good. And winning small is always more exciting than not winning at all.

Choose Flat Top Machines Over Progressive Slot Machines

Most people are at least a little bit familiar with the concept of a progressive slot machine jackpot. That’s a game with the ticker that tracks how big the jackpot has gotten. The jackpot grows as players make bets on the machine (or its sister machines).

Eventually, if the progressive jackpot gets big enough, the game’s payback percentage will inevitably be above 100%. But the problem here is twofold.

For one thing, the probability of winning a progressive jackpot, especially a big one, is so low that it makes the expected value of that game irrelevant. If you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to win a prize, that prize might as well not exist.

For another, that jackpot keeps growing because the machine (or machines) take a tiny percentage of each bet to “fuel” that jackpot. This comes directly from the payback percentage for the game. Where else could it come from?

A flat top machine, on the other hand, has a flat top prize. It doesn’t change. It’s usually 1,000 for 1 or 2,000 for 1. You’ll win more money more often on a flat top machine than you will on a progressive slot machine.

Play Online Slot Machine Games Carefully

Different casinos have different average payback percentages for their slot machine games. The casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, for example, are more competitive than the slot machines in the local tavern or gas station.

But the most competitive casinos of all time are the ones targeting an internet audience. They can afford to be competitive, too, because they have a worldwide audience to compete for. Even people who are unable to travel, for whatever reason, can play online slot machines.

The problem with online slot machines, though, is that some online casinos are slower to pay out than others. And some internet casinos, especially if they’re based in another country, might not pay out at all.

Spend a little time on some online gambling forums and notice how many complaints have to do with players who are mad that they can’t get their winnings back from the online casino.

You should stick with online casinos that are recommended by legitimate online gambling portals (like this one).

How To Pick The Right Slot Machine At A Live Casino (and Online)

Look for sites that aren’t overtly pushing sales when you’re trying to find a recommendation. Website owners can make a small fortune in a short amount of time referring customers to online casinos. This makes it hard to find an unbiased source of reviews.

The Players Club Card Won’t Affect Your Chances of Winning

The players club card is a card you sign up for at the casino that you insert into the machine while you play. It tracks how much you’re betting over time and pays you loyalty rewards in the form of rebates and comps as a tiny percentage of that.

For example, a players club card set to pay back 0.2% of your action can generate significant amounts of “freebies” during a weekend spent gambling.

Let’s say you spend eight hours playing slots at the casino over a weekend, and you’re betting $3 per spin. If you’re an average gambler, you’ll make 600 spins per hour, which equates to $1,800 in action per hour.

You earn rewards at the rate of 0.2% X $1800, or $3.60 per hour. Over the weekend, you get $28.80 in total casino comps.

The casino, of course, expects to win far more than $28.80 over that amount of action. But even if you’re winning, the casino doesn’t care, because it makes its money on the aggregate action of thousands of players over hundreds of hours.

You’ll see a lot of gambling bloggers offer the standard advice of always using the players club card. This isn’t terrible advice. From a purely mathematical perspective, you might as well get your 0.2%.

But I like to account for more nuance than that. Think about the casinos’ goals in offering that card. Isn’t their goal to get you to gamble more?

When you sign up for the players club card, the casino takes your name, address, phone number, and email address. They use this contact information to market to you.

Let’s say you lose an average of $300 on a trip to the casino playing slots. Also, let’s assume you go to the casino four times a year, for a total loss of $1,200.

You can get back about $120 in the comps from the card. But if the advertising from the casino convinces you to make one extra trip to the casino a year, the loss for the year jumps to $1,500.

The casino spent $120, but they made $180 profit on it. And advertising is more effective with some people than others.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether the rebates are worth getting the advertising.

Consider the Boulder Strip for Land-Based Slots

The best payback percentages in a Las Vegas casino are on the machines at the Boulder Strip, which average around 96% if you play nickel, quarter, or dollar slots.

Contrast that with the average 90% to 92% return on the casinos on the main Las Vegas Strip, and you’ll see a huge difference.

Let’s take our average gambler who spends eight hours gambling over a weekend. This gambler puts $1800 x 8 hours into action on a weekend, which is $14,400.

If you lose 4% of that, you’re looking at a loss of $576.

On the other hand, if you lose 9% of that, which is what you’d probably lose on the Strip, your losses for the week would look more like $1,296.

Of course, those losses are averages over the long run, but you get averages like that by paying out winners less often and having losing results more often. You also do it by offering smaller prizes on the occasional wins.

Stay Away From Slots Based on Famous Intellectual Properties

You’ll see all kinds of brands used by slot machine manufacturers. These can involve TV shows, celebrities, or other products. Businessmen like to call this kind of thing “synergy.” The brand gets exposure in the casino, and the game gets played more often by fans of the brand.

Some of the newest examples of this include Sex and the City slots (based on the HBO TV show), Adam Levine slots, and Wheel of Fortune slots.

The manufacturer pays a licensing fee to use the intellectual property. For example, someone out there owns the rights to the old TV show Hee Haw. If you want to create a slot machine based on that property, you have to pay the owner. Where do you think they get the money to pay for that license?

If you guessed that it comes almost directly from the payback percentage of the game, give yourself a gold star!

When possible, play slot machines that aren’t tied to an existing intellectual property or celebrity. This means skipping the Dolly Parton and Elvis slots and playing more obscure games like Burning Bar slots or Double Diamond Deluxe slots.

I can’t guarantee a higher payback percentage on such games, but chances are, you’ll do better on the games that don’t involve a licensed property.

Conclusion

What makes a good slot machine “good?”

How To Find Slot Machines That Are Most Likely To Hit ...

The main thing, for most of us, is the payback percentage. That’s the mathematically expected return you’ll see from the game over time.

You can’t predict anything remotely close to the actual payback percentage of a slot machine game, but I’ve offered some good rules of thumb for how to find games with a higher payback percentage.

Honestly, though, you’re still mathematically better off playing table games. But these are some great tips to keep in mind when you’re really looking to pick a good slot machine.

Introduction to Choosing Slot Machines

Once a specific casino has been determined to currently be the best of any available, choosing slot machines becomes the next step towards making a profit at slots.

Remember, statistics supplied to state gaming commissions show that the odds of winning are, on average, somewhere around 90%. By assessing all available casinos, then selecting the best possible, you’ve already improved your odds of winning – perhaps by several percentage points.

Whatever your gambling goals are, we’ll talk about those in the next step Identifying Gambling Goals. For now, we need to consider choosing slot machines that will most likely improve our overall odds even more.

So, we’ve walked into our best casino to choose slot machines with the highest odds of winning we can find. How do we select a good slot machine? Most people don’t – they dive right in without much of a plan. Well, we have a plan.

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Why? Because everybody says it’s all about luck. If you pick wrong, “Well,” they say, “better luck next time.” Remember, casino employees are trained to say things like that. If you’d won a jackpot instead, you can believe they would have said, “You’re lucky! I’ll see you later when you win another jackpot!”

Slot attendants have a job to do, and it most certainly isn’t to get you to leave when you should. And, it’s difficult to not to influenced by such comments. But, try not to be.

In the following sections, I’ll briefly explain the following aspects of choosing slot machines:

  • How odds are set within a slot machine
  • Choosing denomination and maximum credits based on bankroll
  • Basics of reading a slot machine’s paytable
  • A simple way to use paytables to pick the best machines, and avoid the worst

Two Separate Odds of Winning

The odds of winning for a slot machine is a limited number of settings from the manufacturer. Besides understanding limited settings are available, it may help to understand that slot machines have two odds of winning to determine:

  • If a player will or will not win anything
  • How much that win will be, i.e., the jackpot amount

Why is understanding these two types of odds significant when choosing slot machines? Because winning slot machines come in all jackpot sizes. You’re still winning if you’re getting enough small jackpots that your bankroll isn’t shrinking. Even if it is slowly depleting, the bankroll can last quite a bit longer, so that’s also a winning slot machine.

Winning many jackpots this way is bankroll cycling. It may not seem very satisfactory, but whether it does or not depends entirely on what your gambling goals are. One type of gambling goal, earning maximum complimentary gifts, is most often achieved via bankroll cycling.

Another point about setting slot machine odds is, how often they change? Of course, it depends on the age of the casino, as discussed in the previous step Assessing Casinos for Success, or if it’s been renovated lately.

In my experience, older-style casinos change their slot machine odds every 7-10 days. Newer-style casinos can change their slot machine odds whenever the machine has been idle for 15 minutes or more, without a players club card inserted or the machine temporarily locked by a slot attendant.

Matching Bankrolls to Denomination/Credits

Only you can decide how much bankroll you want to risk gambling. I highly recommend bringing only as much money you can safely afford to lose comfortably.

Bankrolls quite literally determine which slot machines you can play. But, there’s more to it than understanding a $100 bankroll lets you play a 1-credit, $100-denomination exactly once, with very, very little chance of winning.

Whatever bankroll you have limits which slot machines can be played and how much it can be played. Slot machines have denominations ($0.01, $0.25, $1, $5, $10, etc.) and the maximum credits that can be placed in a single bet.

Slot machines typically must run for a while before wins become more likely. Yes, wins can occur at the first press of a button. They can also happen within the first few bets, where casinos offer a taste. But, usually, they need to run for a while.

About 100-120 bets is the right amount to be prepared to play to determine if you’re sitting at a winning (or breakeven) slot machine. Yes, be careful initially, perhaps making as few as 20 bets, to determine if it happens to be a “bad” machine. Trust your instincts!

If it is a poorly performing machine, a “tight” slot machine, it won’t pay out anything at all. Quick decisions are necessary here, so limited betting gives a clue to its performance, yet still leaves enough to gamble with on another machine if it isn’t – assuming you stop playing it as soon as you notice it’s not performing well enough.

So, again, you determine how much bankroll you can afford to spend. Now, take that number and divide it by 120 bets. If your bankroll is $60, then that’s 50 cents per bet. In such a way, the right choice is a 2-credit, quarter-denomination slot machine. Or, a 50-credit, penny-denomination slot machine.

Always remember to play maximum credits for the highest odds of winning. Meaning, your casino may not have a 2-maximum-credit quarter or 50-maximum-credit penny machines. But, perhaps they have a 1-maximum-credit quarter or less-than-50-maximum-credits penny machines. Such slot machines would provide more than 120 bets of play, which is going in the right direction!

Reading a Slot Machine’s Paytable

When choosing a slot machine to play, a crucial aspect of winning is to review its paytable before playing. Frankly, the casino industry gains an advantage over players that don’t read slot machine paytables.

How To Find Slot Machines That Are Most ... - Casino.org Blog

Located somewhere on a slot machine is one or more tables showing the number of credits won if specific combinations of reel symbols appear in the pay line after the player makes a bet. Below is a relatively generic example of a paytable.

The figure shows reel combinations along with their jackpot depending on the number of credits bet. Paytables don’t typically explain how much credits are worth. In general, the top row is the maximum jackpot of the machine.

Not every reel combination and its associated jackpot are usually shown in a paytable. Other reel combinations not shown in the top rows are also presented in the paytable area. Slot machines with WILD symbols can represent it with a myriad of other possible reel symbols.

A final element of paytable example provided is specific information on winning reel combinations, which can include an indication of how the slot machine operates during play. The bottom row of symbol explains that that slot machine has reel symbols which will move after the reels stop momentarily.

Such additional features may not activate until the maximum credits are bet. It can sometimes be difficult, or impossible, to determine this. Most slot machines with bonus rounds will provide at least some information about it within its paytable.

Developing a habit of reviewing and studying a slot machine’s paytable can help improve your ability to judge the financial risks involved with playing that slot machine.

How to Avoid the Worst Slot Machines

The best way to improve the odds of winning via slot machine gambling is to stop making “sucker bets”. In less colorful language, avoid playing slot machines with terrible odds of winning.

First and foremost, understand when choosing slot machines that there are indeed terrible slot machines at a casino. By merely avoiding them whenever possible, on average, your long-term gambling return will improve. Each time we raise our odds like this, we’re pushing closer to achieving our gambling goals. So, let’s make sure we do that, shall we?

How To Find A Loose Slot Machine In A Casino

Calculate this “Goodness Ratio” as follows:

  1. When choosing slot machines, as discussed above, find the paytable with the denomination and maximum credits that best matches your available bankroll.
  2. Take a close look at the paytable. What is the maximum possible jackpot when maximum credits are bet?
    • If the top jackpot is displayed in currency, divide it by both the denomination of the machine and the maximum credits
    • If the top jackpot is displayed in credits, divide it by only the maximum credits

This “Goodness Ratio” tells us how worthwhile a specific slot machine is to play relative to others. By using this approach, any slot machine can be compared to any other slot machine.

Example: In the paytable above, the maximum jackpot is 2,400 credits with three maximum credits. Therefore, its Goodness Ratio is 2,400 / 3 = 800.

Repeat this calculation for slot machines of interest. While this Goodness Ratio will be similar for many slot machines, it can be startling to find “sucker bet” slot machines that might not otherwise be avoided.

Summary for Choosing Slot Machines

After a casino has been chosen, it’s time to select candidate slot machines most likely to result in a relatively high-value win. The size of your available bankroll, whatever it is, is an essential factor in this selection process. The bankroll size needs to be matched to the slot machine’s denomination and the number of maximum credits.

Here, we’ve also discussed how slot machines calculated odds twice: once to determine if you’ve won, and again to determine how much you’ve won. Another critical aspect discussed to improve a player’s performance was the basics of reading a slot machine’s paytable.

Finally, we talked about the “goodness” ratio to help select candidate slot machines and, perhaps critically important when improving our odds of winning, knowing precisely which slot machines must be avoided.

Next Steps

The next step on your journey to improving slots performance is Identifying Gambling Goals. Enjoy!

My research indicates I’m the first to share this information and offer personal coaching for slots enthusiasts.

I sincerely hope you find it both enjoyable and useful. For questions, call my voicemail hotline at 702-90-SLOTS, email me at Jon Friedl, or reach out to me through social media:

Further, I suggest that you sign up for my Free Report on the Best 7 Online Resources for Gamblers. Not only will you immediately receive a great list of online resources, but also other tips, tricks, and slots-related articles as I post them.

For the foreseeable future, this email subscription is my only request of you:

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Finally, to provide further assistance if needed, I’m offering inexpensive, 50-minute-long, one-to-one Personal Coaching Sessions with me, your fellow slots enthusiast and friendly slot machine expert. Let’s talk! With only a dozen openings available most weeks, this is a strictly limited opportunity!

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By Jon H. Friedl, Jr. Ph.D., President
Jon Friedl LLC