Slots

How To Play Slots

Whether you want to play slot machines in a land-based casino or play online slots, the course of action remains the same.

How To Pick Slots

If you spent some time with gamblers, you will hear that most of them go with their intuition when picking slots to play. "The machine was hot", or "avoid this online slot machine, it's a cold one". Let's kill the myth now - slots aren't cold or hot! Instead, they have features and metrics to help you choose the one(s) right for you and know which are the best online slots for your money. Some of this data is public - though not entirely!

RTP

The return-to-player rate, or RTP, is a percentage-based measure of how much of all money entered in a machine will be paid out to players. Generally, slots RTP are around 90 to 95 percent. The missing chunk is the house edge (what casinos keep).

Many casino game software developers make this information public, and so do some land-based casinos. The worry with making this information widely available is that it would essentially get players to only play on the one slot that offers the highest RTP. This is why software providers such as find other ways to market their games such as having a TV show or movie theme. There are even the likes of that market their slots as a 3D movie experience.

To summarize, a slot game with a high RTP (above 95%) will return a lot of the received wagers back to players over time. Lower RTP games don't return as much whilst medium-RTP slots sit in between.

House Edge

An online or land-based casino slot machine gets money and returns a predetermined percentage of it called the return-to-player rate. Everything else is the house edge and is kept by the casino. A casino's house edge is also referred to as its holding rate or holding percentage. Real-money online slots are set to make money for the operator.

For example, a video slot machine with an RTP of 93.5% has a house edge of 6.5%. An online slot game with an RTP of 96.75% has a holding rate of 3.25%.

Variance

Slot variance, or slot volatility, is defined as the likelihood of hitting a winning combination.

Therefore, high-variance slots rarely land winning combinations on the reels but have therefore bigger payouts. Inversely, low-variance slots have frequent wins but consequently, payouts are smaller. Medium-variance slots hit a sweet spot for occasional gamblers.

The volatility of slot machines is important for players to consider. For instance, if your bankroll is quite low, you would naturally prefer a low-variance slot machine in order to keep on playing. High-variance slots may go for long stretches without giving any winning combo - they are high risk and high reward!

Features

Not everything is about mathematics in slots. Features is an umbrella term to talk about the characteristics of a slot machine. Features mostly revolve around the specific gameplay for that video slot which translates into its slot symbols and icons, its number of reels and rows, as well as its paytable and paylines.

Bonus symbols, wilds, scatters, multipliers, free spin symbols, and more. Features make playing slots different between games. Whilst you do want an exciting game whilst spinning reels, things get very confusing nowadays as slot machine developers craft very absorbing and mesmerizing features. When talking to slot fanciers, we discovered that most of them barely understand paytables these days. They simply spin and hope that the screen lights up with a patchwork of wins!

Themes

When wondering how to choose a slot machine, online or offline, the game's theme should come into play. From seasonal slots to classical slots, different people love different slot themes. Huge hollywood franchises have their own branded slot games.

Here, there are no objective guidelines. It is mostly about what you enjoy sitting down in front of and staring at for hours of play.