Since jackpots online and offline have been in existence, people have asked themselves the eternal question, how often do slot machines hit the jackpots?
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It’s been a question inviting both hope and trouble. We’re here to discuss the odds of slot wins and look under the hood of how big slot wins online and offline work, and more importantly, how often they occur. There’re several key aspects of the experience to consider before you can make an informed decision. The main things you should be looking into when it comes to playing slots are:
- The Return to Player (RTP) rates of the game
- The slot volatility, i.e. frequency of payout
- The actual probabilities of landing a big slot win
Slot Machines Tips to Win - Understanding Slot Odds Stick to machines with small jackpots and fixed payouts. The bigger the jackpot a slot machine offers, the tougher it is to win.
Before we delve into the essence of how often slot machines payout, we must be perfectly honest with each other; we can’t distil the nature of slot payouts to a pristine formula and no matter how good we are at understanding the why behind these games, there will be a substantial part that will depend on pure luck alone, even if you play at the best paying slots sites around.
Slot Machines: The Basics
Each slot machine comes with a randomised outcome thanks to the technology in the very crux of it – the Random Number Generator (RNG). RNGs are cutting-edge algorithms that guarantee the “complete randomness” at a casino. The RNG is needed to help computers create randomness, as they are programmed to predict an outcome and don’t understand “random” the same way you and we do.
When it comes to actual casino play, there is absolutely no way of knowing when a jackpot will arrive. The average pay cycle for each game will vary. It’s worth logging your spin outcomes as it can help you determine when the jackpot window has a more probable chance of being open. However, the complete randomness of the RNG makes it impossible for anyone, be that a supercomputer or a mathematical wiz, to determine the outcome or be able to call the exact time a big jackpot will actually hit.
Tempted by the idea of imminent big slot wins, many players have been persistent in their determination to spot the patterns.
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It’s worth spending more time observing rather than playing yourself. In 2016, the win cycles for Mega Moolah happened every 70 days, give or take, but it’s worth noting that there were only four payouts the entire year.
The payouts started early in April and continued through late November. In 2019, we’ve already witnessed slightly more hectic results that haven’t followed a particular pattern so far. The first win came on January 30th, 2019, followed by another one on March 5th and then another one on March 6. If the wide-spread trend repeats itself, we can expect the next jackpot to hit 33 days from March 6th, around April 8th or before that.
This would be a fair observation. In 2017, the space of each was at least a month, but not exceeding two months. There were 13 wins in total, the game’s largest number on record.
Does capturing historical statistical data help determine when a mega jackpot is likely to payout?
The answer is – not really. While there is some evidence to suggest that payout cycles happen in a window of one or two months, we have no way of knowing how many slots wins there are going to be on any given specific year.
There is a reason why certain games never manage to amass a multi-million jackpots, this has to do with the return to player (RTP) rates and the volatility.
Consider the RTPs in Slots Online
Just because an outcome is random, doesn’t mean we can’t pick the games statistically more likely to payout. Whether it’s a progressive jackpot or a fixed jackpot, the Return to Player (RTP) will tell you a little something about what to expect.
Now, here’s the thing about RTPs. They are accurate, but in order to get them right, you will need to play around 10,000 spins. Anything below that, and you may end up with deviations. Playing less than 10,000 RTPs can still turn out accurate, it’s just for the most accurate results, you will have to play through towards that figure.
It’s like flipping a coin 10 times vs flipping it 1000 times, you can certainly expect that 50-50 outcome to be more accurate after 1000 times than 10 times when a freak outcome of 80-20 is more probable. RTPs don’t factor the bonus amount, so when considering them you must keep that in mind and regard them as something that will help you extend your stay at a casino and keep a healthy budget.
If you do avoid the progressive games, you can guarantee yourself a slightly more controlled type of play and less risk in exchange for more frequent returns.
Slot Volatility: Pay Attention
‘Volatility’ in slots and other casino games refers to the payout frequency a slot has and how much is paid. Again, this is more applicable to your regular slots wins rather than the big slot wins you want to get by landing a mega jackpot. And yet, volatility will help you plan your bankroll just a little bit better.
Playing high volatility games means that the payouts will be bigger, but you will also have more cold streaks when the spins won’t get you any return. With low volatility, you will enjoy frequent payouts, but not really big winnings.
There are trade-offs and depending on your budget, you will find both slots applicable. When it comes to jackpots, Mega Moolah, which we used as an example here, is definitely on the high-end of the volatility spectrum. So don’t be too disappointing if you have a run of 10 or 20 spins with no payouts at all, that’s just the nature of a high volatility slot game.
If you are looking for low-volatility jackpot games, you can opt for a game such as Dead or Alive by NetEnt. The standard jackpots payout around 200-1000 coins a payout, making this game a perfect pick for those of you who enjoy slot machine jackpots but don’t have a larger bankroll than you need to play through for the mega jackpots.
Staying on Top of Your Bankroll
If you are keen on getting some decent slot wins, you needn’t necessarily go after the highest-risk games. It’s quite possible to build slot wins incrementally, indulging in games that have steadier, even if somewhat smaller payouts.
Jackpot hunting is a tough game and while quite a few people report big slot wins you will have to remind yourself that luck has no small part to play in the final outcome. Only after realising this can you use the other information you have learnt here to better your odds at securing a hefty prize.
The gaming industry is big business in the U.S., contributing an estimated US$240 billion to the economy each year, while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 million jobs.
What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.
Spinning-reel slots in particular are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines and other forms of gambling.
What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.
The price of a slot
An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.
But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.
Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.
Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or expected house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.
For example, consider a game with a 10 percent house advantage – which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $900,000, resulting in a casino gain of $100,000. Thus from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.
Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels and receives no payout, that’ll be the price – not 10 cents.
So who is correct? Both, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.
A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.
Short-term vs. long-term
This difference in price perspective is rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.
Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.
Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two – it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners – which is why so many people play in the first place.
Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.
What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.
Raising the price
Ultimately, the casino is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope and variance. Even though a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, such as 4 percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.
This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table – which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table is visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination remains hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage – that is, the long-term price of the wager.
This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players – if they can get away with it.
Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.
Slot Machines Jackpots
This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.
Getting away with it
Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, believing that players can detect these price shocks.
Our new research, however, has found that increases in the casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.
Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere 3 feet away.
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Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within each of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.
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Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. And for price-sensitive gamblers, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.