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 may be found good online casino slot (click here) by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a great deal of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Bear in mind, 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 a really large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of those who join the game, the statistics of every hand played, and even 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 utilization of the RNG is equivalent to the final use, and may 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 advantage of software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines may also have payout percentages as little as 83%, which is just not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as the other machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you shall see that it rarely drops below 95% – that is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the average. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are within the 97% – 98% range. Consequently you may spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and on an average it will cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And the well-paying win is balanced, of course, 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.

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