Some Popular Myths And Facts About Las Vegas Slot Machines

It was in the 1980s that slot machines finally overtook traditional casino games such as roulette, poker, blackjack and baccarat as the casinos highest earners in a year. Since then, they have continued to generate magnificent profits for casino owners as players are only to ready to place their coins or cards into the slot and start the reels spinning.

Indeed, nowadays 75% of the annual revenue generated by all Las Vegas casinos comes from slot machines and whichever casino you attend on the Strip, or in the virtual world, slot machines are the ones which seem to draw in the most attention from punters.

Yet why this is remains a mystery and to understand this, we need to understand a little more about the slot machine and some of the myths and legends that surround it, tempered with a little grounding in the facts about these frantic and popular gaming machines.

There's more chance of winning on slot machines than other games...MYTH

Unfortunately for the slot machine fan, the slots offer arguably the worst odds in the casino for a player to achieve long term success playing the game. Most slot machines are programmed to return between 75 and 98% of the money that they take in to players, with a small amount of money kept back for profit for the casino.

These odds, while seeming favourable initially, can be misleading however. A slot machine set to a 98% payout rate does not mean that 98% of the time you will win something back on each spin, but instead what it means that over an infinite period of time, 98% of the money put into it is returned to users in one form of another.

Of course, some of the time this can come in the form of big jackpot wins, but these are random events and no player skill can aid them to achieve this turn of events. In short, when you take out the money paid as profit to the casino, money that goes towards a progressive jackpot (if the slot has one) and all the bigger payments made to users, most slot machines only pay out to users on around 9% of spins.

Bearing in mind that most wins for the user is either a return of their stake, or double their stake, it is easy to see how $100 can be spent on a slot machine, with no real return, in a matter of minutes.

The truth is slot machines are not the games to play if you are interested in keeping the odds on your side. Online texas holdem is usually played using forced bets of small and big blind bets by two or more players. Other casino games offer much better house odds that are easily definable and understandable. Slot machines are played by people who do not mind spending their cash on the off-chance of winning a large sum of money, but with the realisation that the likelihood of that happening is very slim.

If a hasn't been won for a while, then it is due to be won...MYTH

This is a common misconception. At its heart, a slot machine is a large random number generator and as such, there is still the same amount of chance that a jackpot will be won, regardless of when the last lucky player landed it. Because the machine is totally random, the chance of landing the jackpot are the same whether it was won on the last spin, last week, last month or even last year.

I know a system to on the slots...MYTH

As we stated above, slot machines are based on a random number generator so any expert purporting to be able to sell you a system that will offer you untold riches from playing on the slot machines should be regarded with suspicion. There is no system that can accurately predict random numbers for slot machines and as such, no system exists to exploit them. This is precisely why casinos are happy to stock them in the real world and online, in their thousands.

Selecting which slot you play carefully can increase your chances of winning...TRUE

Research by slot machine experts has shown that carefully choosing your slots can give you slightly better chances of winning. Certain slot machines offer better payout ratios than others (some casinos even advertise their 98% pay out slots), whereas slot machines in less busy areas, such as airports, tend to have a far smaller payout ratio and thus offer less chance of success.

Mechanised slots also tend to payout slightly more frequently than video slots and there are also differences in the slots offered from casino to casino, with the best casinos in Las Vegas for slots being the ones away from the main strip area.

So yes, you can increase your chances of winning on the slots by carefully selecting the machines you play and at the casinos you play in.

Where a slot machine is placed in the casino impacts how often it pays out... MYTH

Another common misconception is that where a slot machine is located in a casino affects how much it will pay out. Many people believe that those slots in high traffic areas are set to pay out at a lower percentage than those in less frequented areas.

The truth is that several experts in slots have conducted research into this and found absolutely no correlation between the location of the machine and whether it pays out more or less.

A slot machine will always follow a pattern of winning lines over a lengthy period of time... MYTH

Many people believe that they can recognise winning patters when they have played slots long enough and can 'predict' when a winning line will come up based on previous spins. Unfortunately, this is not the case as machines, as we have already stated, are based on a sequence of random numbers and as such, there is no pattern that is discernible other than the one the player believes they are seeing.

They may not be the most player friendly in terms of odds, but slot machines remain hugely popular in casinos as they require little skill to play and can offer players a slim chance of winning a life-changing amount of money for a relatively small stake.