A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A superb article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It may 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. Bear in mind, they can be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

At the same time, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside a really large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of those that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, and even more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There is no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that will be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG is the same as the very last use, and may be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, although the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as little as 83%, which isn’t true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact 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% – which is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the common. The truth is, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are within the 97% – 98% range. Therefore you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and on the typical it shall cost you $7.50. But players don’t gamble to be average: the true reward will be the well-paying win. And also the high-paying win is balanced, as always, by a range 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. Which is a far cry blog post from Ucsd the specific situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.

Players improve 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 involved in the thrill.