A great deal has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. An excellent article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared within 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. Of course, they’re all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

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

Land-based slot machines may also have payout percentages as little as 83%, which is just not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as another machines. You can see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and you shall see which it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the house makes a 5% profit, on an average. The truth is, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are within the 97% – 98% range. This means you may spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and on an average it’s going to cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And also the high-paying win is balanced, simply, by a range of players who lose and finance that win.

So are online casino slots online 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 improve odds, they get absolute consistency across all games – but no one can guarantee a win every time. That is just the nature of gambling, and that is a part of the thrill.