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 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 whole lot of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. As always, Iunis`s blog they’re all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.
Conversely, 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 people who 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 isn’t any “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that may be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each usage of the RNG is equivalent to the final use, and may be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, but the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true benefit from software-based online casino slots.
Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as low 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 shall see that it rarely drops below 95% – which is, the home makes a 5% profit, on a normal. The truth is, most casinos can document that their payout percentages will be in the 97% – 98% range. Therefore you may spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and also on a normal it’s going to cost you $7.50. But players don’t gamble to be average: the true reward will be the well-paying win. And the well-paying win is balanced, keep in mind, 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. That’s a far cry from the matter with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.
Players improve odds, they get absolute consistency across all games – but nobody can guarantee a win every time. That is just the nature of gambling, and that’s included in the thrill.