Casino

Slot machine strategy guide

You can find a lot of terrible slot machine strategy tips on the internet. Over the years we’ve seen it all.

There are electronic gadgets available for purchase that promise to cash out slot machines. Infinite amounts of paper have been wasted printing books that promise slot machine tactics.

It’s all rubbish. Let’s get one thing straight from the start – nothing on this site (or anywhere else online) is going to make you a consistent slot winner. There is no such advice.

This is because slot machines are designed to give back less money than they take in. In other words, they guarantee a profit and there is nothing you can do to influence this design in any meaningful way.

A good slot machine strategy focuses on two things: it increases your chances of winning and helps you save money that you might otherwise lose.

This page has been designed as the ultimate online resource for no-nonsense slot machine strategy tips. Included here are:

  • Common sense reactions to common slot misunderstandings,
  • A detailed guide to the fundamentals of money management for slot players
  • A section that recommends other games that might be of interest to people interested in slot machines.

We believe that if you read a few thousand words for half an hour or so that we have put together on the subject, you will become a more confident and informed slot player.

An unfortunate truth about slot machines

We have many good things to say about slots. We all like visual effects – it’s more fun than watching a ball bounce around on a spinning wheel. We like the variety of games like balloonies rtp. We like the variety of bet sizes available.

The truth is, we could poetically rave about the charm of the humble slot machine for thousands of words, but that would get us nowhere in terms of game strategy.

There’s one thing we don’t like about slot machines that we wanted to get out there right away. The worst thing about slot machines, from the perspective of a strategy gamer.

One can never know the house edge on a particular slot machine. In fact, it’s the only casino game we can think of that can’t be determined with something like a house edge.

Why is that?

It has to do with the design of modern slot machines. Since slots depend on a random number generator and a potentially infinite number of virtual reel positions, we don’t know how likely the various symbols are that lead to payouts.

Think of a video poker game. Video poker is a simple game of calculating a house edge because we know the probability of different hands appearing. We know this because the winning hands are based on poker hand rankings.

That means we can look at the paytable of a video poker game, use the information we already know about the odds of drawing different hands, and come up with the casino’s built-in advantage. We can do this for any game.

A roulette wheel has 38 positions where the ball could end up. We can find out the probability of a single number (or a property of a number) because we know the total odds of a number that appears.

Without information on a slot machine’s house edge, things like bankroll management and game strategy become difficult. Slot machine strategy is more of an art than a science. Do not be afraid, it is an art that we have studied and participated in for decades.