A great deal 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 can be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a lot of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Keep Going In this article mind, they are 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, as well as more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There isn’t any “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 last use, and will 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 good thing about software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as little as 83%, which is not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the additional machines. You can see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you will see that it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the normal. The truth is, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% – 98% range. Consequently you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and also on the common it shall cost you $7.50. But players don’t gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. As well as the well-paying win is balanced, as always, 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. Which 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.