A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A good article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared within 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. Simply, they’re all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.
Alternatively, 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 much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that don’t change. There is absolutely no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that will be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG matches the last use, and can be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, though the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true benefit of 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 same winning percentage as the additional machines. You may see the payout percentages for many best online gambling gaming sites, and you will see that it rarely drops below 95% – which is, the home makes a 5% profit, on an average. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% – 98% range. Therefore you may spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and also on the average it shall cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward will be the high-paying win. And the well-paying win is balanced, remember, 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 situation 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 part of the thrill.
So the next time you want to play a slot machine, even if there’s a land-based casino right next door, you are better advised to go to your computer and play the online casino slots. They may be a far better bet.