A whole lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. An excellent article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It may be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a lot of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Simply, they are all illegal and don’t happen. But read the article, closely.

Having said that, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside an extremely large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of men and women who join the game, the statistics of every hand played, and much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that don’t change. There is absolutely no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that may be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each use of the RNG is equivalent to the last use, and will be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, however the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true good thing about software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines could also have payout percentages as little as 83%, which just isn’t true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as another machines. You may see the payout percentages for many trusted online slot gambling site, Southwesternuniversity site, gaming sites, and also you shall see which it rarely drops below 95% – that’s, the house makes a 5% profit, on the average. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% – 98% range. Therefore you can spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, as well as on the standard it shall cost you $7.50. But players don’t gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And the high-paying win is balanced, keep in mind, by a number of players who lose and finance that win.

So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. That is a far cry from the specific situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.

Players improve odds, they get absolute consistency across all games – but nobody can guarantee a win every time. That’s just the nature of gambling, and that’s included in the thrill.

So the next time you want to play a slot machine, even if there’s a land-based casino right next door, you are better advised to go to your computer and play the on-line casino slots. They can be a far better bet.