A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A fantastic article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can 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. Bear in mind, they can be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.
Having said that, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside a very large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of individuals that 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’s 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 the same as the final 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 really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.
Land-based quality slot machines may also have payout percentages as low as 83%, which isn’t true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the additional machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you shall see which it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the house makes a 5% profit, on a typical. Actually, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% – 98% range. Consequently you may spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and on a normal it will cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the high-paying win. And also the well-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 matter 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 is just the nature of gambling, and that is a division of the thrill.