Slot games take up more than three quarters of the floor space in the average US casino. In cyberspace, the situation is not so different. An online casino might have hundreds of slot games available compared with 30 or 40 table games.
One of the biggest casino myths is that all slot games are the same. It’s a little like suggesting all racing games are the same. Sure, they have the objective to cross the line first but the gameplay is quite different from one to another, and that affects the difficulty and the likelihood of finishing in first place.
Slot games have distinct themes, from traditional fruit machines to games based on sport movies or Roman mythology to name a few. But when it comes to winning or losing, you need to put on your x-ray specs and see through all that to the mathematical principles that drive the random number generator at the machine’s heart.
Return to Player (RTP)
Every slot game is programmed such that it pays out a certain proportion of the funds paid into it. With mechanical machines this was done by each physical reel having, say, one bell, two lemons, four cherries and so on. The probability of landing three bells or three lemons could be calculated and prizes set in order to deliver the desired RTP. Today’s slot games are far more complex and they use random number generators instead of physical reels to decide what symbols appear. But the underlying principle is exactly the same.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, 70 percent RTP was not unusual. Present day online casinos have fewer overheads so can afford much tighter margins. Most modern slots have RTP around 95 to 96 percent. Some are even above 98 percent. Gamble Online slot games for real money provides useful information for US casino players on where to find the best real money slot games with high RTP.
Hit frequency
The other important metric that drives the behavior of a slot game is volatility. A high volatility slot has a tendency to give away nothing most of the time, but to occasionally spit out a big prize. Low volatility means payouts are regular but usually low in value. Imagine paying for 100 x one coin spins on each of two games. The first one pays out a two coin prize 48 times. The second pays out a 48 coin prize twice. Both machines are demonstrating 96 percent RTP, but the first is low volatility and the second is high.
Volatility is easy to conceptually describe but hard to quantify. Instead we can look at hit frequency, meaning how often the machine pays a prize – this can be any prize, however small. Our example is an extreme one as the two machines have hit frequencies of 48 percent and two percent. The point is that hit frequency has a strong negative correlation with volatility. Hit frequency usually lies between 20 and 40 percent. Higher hit frequency usually implies lower volatility.