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A whole 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. As always, they can be all illegal and don’t happen. But read the article, closely.
However, 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, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that don’t change. There isn’t any “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that can be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each use of the RNG is the same as the very last use, and will be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, though the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true good thing about software-based online casino slots.
Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as little as 83%, which isn’t true with online casino slots gambling. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the other machines. You can see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and you will see which it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the house makes a 5% profit, on the standard. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages will be in the 97% – 98% range. Therefore you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, as well as on an average it shall cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward will be the well-paying win. And also the well-paying win is balanced, remember, by a range 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’s a far cry from the situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.
Players get better 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 part of the thrill.