A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Online Slot Machines
Slots are among the most popular casino games, as they give you the chance to take part in games of chance based on diverse themes.
How do online slots work and what do you know about them before getting started? We’ll be looking at everything you need to know about the slot algorithms and how wins or bonus features are triggered. Here you can check out online slots for fun.
How Are Slots Designed?
If you’ve played land-based slots before, you might be surprised at the number of different online slot presentations of the same type of game you can now find. While some have a retro feel, with several rows of classic symbols, such as fruits, over a few reels, the industry has seen an explosion in the different styles and themes used in recent years.
The first thing you’re likely to spot is the theme, as this is what determines the symbols used and the background images. The theme doesn’t have an effect on the slot mechanism at work.
You could play one slot based on pirates and another that’s got a fruity theme and discover that they work in exactly the same way, as the theme only covers the visual aspect and sometimes the sound.
How Do You Win on a Slot Game?
How do online casino slots work when awarding prizes? The aim of these games has changed little over the years, although new technology and ideas have been added to make them far more varied.
With any slot, the idea is to get a set of matching symbols across the reels to trigger a payout. Do this and you’ll automatically receive a prize. It’s as simple as that and since the symbols fall into place, you can choose to simply press the start button and start playing without understanding any of the rules we’re about to look at.
Any win or features that you trigger are automatically credited to you. This is because each of these games has a paytable where all the symbols are listed with a value beside each of them.
Free Spins and Bonus Rounds
The previous section covered what’s called the base game, which is where you spin the reels and they either land in a winning combination or not. Many modern slots add an extra layer of gameplay in the form of a bonus round.
The most common type of bonus feature is a set of free spins, which are typically triggered by landing a minimum of three of the designated scatter symbols anywhere on the reels. The free spins round may involve some sort of enhancement from the base game, such as more bonus symbols or multipliers, or it might have exactly the same gameplay.
How Much Can You Win Playing Slots?
We need to go back to the paytable if we want to work out in advance how much we could win on a spin. Each of the paying symbols will have a figure next to it, which tells us what could be won by getting a group of these images in a win. If there are bonus rounds, the paytable is where we’ll see what they could be worth.
The amounts listed as the prizes are multiplied by the amount that you wager. This means that the final step to take before spinning the reels is choosing your stake. These games usually accept small stakes, but you should check the list of acceptable amounts before deciding whether to go ahead.
You should look out for multipliers, which are applied in certain situations in some slots. They could come into play when you enter the free spins round, or if you get several consecutive wins you could see multipliers start to get added to them, for example.
How Slots Work Online (RNG)
In the past, the results on mechanical slots were determined by the moving pieces inside them that caused the reels to stop at a certain, random point. When these games moved online, the developers had to look for a way of replicating this process digitally and ensuring that every spin is random using an online slot machine algorithm.
Therefore, when considering how online slot work, we’ll start by looking at the random number generator or RNG. This is a sophisticated piece of software that ensures that the result of every spin is totally random. When you hit the spin button, neither you nor the casino knows if it’s going to be a winning spin or not.
What the Return to Player (RTP) Figure Means
While the RNG ensures that you never know what will happen on any spin, there has to be a degree of control over the amount paid out. Players wouldn’t want to play a slot that very rarely pays out, while the operators can’t afford to risk several jackpots being paid out at the same time.
It has weighted figures for each of the symbols to ensure that the lower-value icons pop up more often. The complexity of these calculations means that the best way for developers to work out how much they expect a slot to pay out is by running millions of spins and seeing what happens.
They can calculate a return to player (RTP) figure based on how online slots work in real life over a massive number of games.
How Do Progressive Jackpots on Slots Work?
You might spot some eye-catching slot titles where a large cash sum is mentioned as the jackpot. How does this fit in with the details that we’ve looked at so far?
Each slot will explain in the paytable or help section what you need to do to win this prize. It’s often paid on a random basis but some games will ask you to complete a bonus round or some other way of claiming this prize.
You’ll probably notice that the progressive jackpot keeps on climbing. This is because a small amount from each wager that gets placed is added to the total. Once a player triggers the top prize, it goes back to the original amount before starting to build up again.
Myths About Online Slots
We can now look at a few of the common myths that exist.
The first is the idea that there are hot and cold slots, which means that they go through streaks whether they either win frequently or lose several times in a row. Some people use this theory as a way of trying to predict which game is “due” to pay out soon.
Since we looked earlier at online slot mechanisms, we know that there’s no way of predicting what a slot does next. It’s completely random, so knowing if a game just paid out or not doesn’t help us calculate what it might do next. You simply need to remember that these are games of chance where no one knows the result of the next spin.
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