A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A fantastic article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a great deal of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Remember, they’re all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

On the flip side, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside an extremely large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of folks who join the game, the statistics of every hand played, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There’s absolutely no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that can be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG is equivalent to the last use, and also will be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, but the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines can also have payout percentages as little as 83%, which isn’t true with online casino slots betting. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as the other machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you shall see that it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the house makes a 5% profit, on the average. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages will be in the 97% – 98% range. Consequently you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and also on the common it’s going to cost you $7.50. But players don’t gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And the high-paying win is balanced, keep in mind, by a number of players who lose and finance that win.

So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. That is a far cry from the specific situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.

Players get better odds, they get absolute consistency across all games – but no-one can guarantee a win every time. That’s just the nature of gambling, and that is included in the thrill.