Information For Slot Machine Addicts!!

Slot machines are by far the easiest games to play at the casino, and also the easiest games to win on!

There are, literally, thousands of different versions, styles and themes of slot machines across the world, both online and in bricks-and-mortar settings.

However, in spite of the vast array of diversity between machines, the principals of the game are always the same: to beat the machine and win the money by managing to achieve a certain combination of symbols that appear on a reel. In effect, each machine uses combinations of winning symbols that are pre-defined. You can usually find out what the combinations are by searching on the machine, in a real casino, or on the screen at an online casino, for the winning table.

Before playing on a machine, no matter which machine it is that you have chosen to play, you should check out whether the casino, with which you are playing, offers a special programme for card players:

What does this mean? You need to verify for each machine that you play on, that once you have subscribed to the casino you will receive bonus points that will be added to your account- points which will permit you to win all kinds of presents that are offered by the casino. Not all casinos will offer these points, but many do so check out their terms and conditions to ensure you are in with a chance of winning.

The types of presents which are offered are many and varied and include such things as the following; vouchers for free meals at the venue, or a free night in their hotels, (obviously only relevant to the bricks-and-mortar casinos), cash prizes, holidays...so you see that it really is worth your while to discover which programmes the casino runs.

It goes without saying that the presents vary form casino to casino and also depend on the modes of play that you choose to practice.

Once you have finished your preliminary researches, the game could not be easier to grasp. Slot machines are a game whereby the results depend, uniquely, on the mechanisms of randomisation that are found inside the machines, or the software for online slot machines, all which is left for you is to press the button, or pull the lever, watch the reels spinning and try to control the parts of the game which you can.

Just One More Day to Play a Slot Machine? Try a Week:

The ‘One Armed Bandit' is one of the first nicknames which were given to a slot machine; the name was attributed to a certain type of slot machine because its lever made it appear to be holding a weapon.

The first manufacturers of slot machines only managed to keep up with the demands for the new machines with great difficulty; they were so popular that casinos from all over the United States were requesting them.

Since those early days the slot machine has travelled many borders and many boundaries, to become a global success, known to practically all 6 billion of us, and possibly a few gorillas.

Poker also found its successful path via the medium of slot machines, by featuring on the reels as winning symbols. And today some Hollywood films even feature the themes present on the early slot machines.

Each slot machine offers players different prices by which you can play your hands. In other words, some machines will allow you to play more than one hand at a time; some have even been known to let players play up to 100 hands! And this is actually one of the more monotonous features of a slot machine; you must assume from this that the slot machine is a very exciting game if that is a monotonous feature.

If, for some people, the spinning of the reels can be therapeutic to some players, then the same thing can be very unnerving for others. Playing several hands at the same time, maybe a dozen, permits those anxious players to prove themselves on a machine before moving on to an even more advanced machine.

There is a major difference which exists between the modern day video slot machines and the old fashioned slot machines. In order to win the maximum jackpot machines having spinning reels, a player must play the maximum specification that the machine asks for (that is usually 3 to 5 tokens; a token varies in price from $1-$100...although there are now some high rollers where you can wager a lot more).

The video slot machines, which posses several winning lines (between 3 and 20 normally) allows you to pay in advance for the price of the multiplication of tokens by the number of lines, so if you play 20 lines for $1 a line, you pay $20 for one spin of the video reels. A very common strategy used by players of video slot machines is to play as many lines as they can afford, it is more expensive, but you are more likely to win.

You can mix up you play and play different styles of machines, between the different themes, the credit requirements, the number of allotted lines, the options for slot machines are innumerable. If you really want to try a bit of everything, you really need to allow yourself more time than a day, book a week!

Grannies and Slot Machines:
Play or free on slot machines! Why start a section with that heading? It is obviously not a question of insulting people. After all, we are all part of the same community, cordiality between all, games, and which means that we can thus appreciate this humour that is right for us, the gambling community!!

Thinking about the cinema and television industry, they often fill their fictitious casinos with women of a certain age, sat down for hours on end in front of a slot machine, wearing huge sunglasses and a head scarf, and a massive pot of tokens to play with, just chink, chink, chink, chink, and chink as the money hits the slot. The grandmother, in gaudy colours, sat in from of the slot machine for hours is an common and well established theme in the movies and television (remember the lerker in Friends?). These women always give the impression of being calm and collected, indeed, the most relaxed in the whole casino, and totally form a part of the casino décor.

Okay, let us learn some of the vocabulary that you will hear around slot machines, and which will help you become a pro in the casino.

A roller: Indicates a machine where the cylinders turn, exactly like in the movies, it stops and symbols appear.

Of the difference between machines and videos, and even online slot machines, the traditional machines are the only ones which have rollers.

The symbols on the different rolls on a slot machine are different from machine to machine and come in all types; fruits, animals, or practically anything else. This is the case regardless of whether the game is mechanic or computer based.

The machines of the type ‘low level' or ‘slant top' are known as the ‘lazy' type because they offer the player the possibility of the player to sit on a stool in front of the machine, as the grandmothers do in the films. The machines of the type ‘upright' or ‘stand-up' are self-evidently for people to stand at.

The machines that are called ‘tight' only pay-out a minimum amount of cash; they keep a huge percentage of the punters money.

The machines which are known as ‘loose' are frequent payers, the pay out a large percentage of punters cash- it has been known for a loose machine to pay out 100%.

A range of machines that are in a group are known as a carousel.

Finally, the decisions come down to a computer, the RNG- Random Number Generator is the data processing part of the slot machine, which determines the different probabilities and statistics of the results for each machine, it is a completely random and fair process and the machine uses formulas to establish the outcome. In other words, slot machines are not tweaked to ensure that you lose, although some can be set ‘tighter ‘ or ‘looser' and you may get the occasional unscrupulous casino owner who cons his punters.

The payment line is the horizontal line on the machine which indicates the combination that has won because it will be directly above the symbols.

When it is the case that a slot machine is not functioning properly an alert is sent to the casino staff who then try and fix the machine, or call an engineer. So the safeguards are pretty good, the only problem would be if the alarm system broke too, then you would not know. This can work in your favour though, I have known somebody to find a machine which was registering 50p (English denomination) as a £1 coin and he won a lot of money...he didn't share if very nicely though- and I was the one who was finding as many 50p's as I could!!

A hand payment is a payment which is fulfilled by an employee of the casino, rather than by the machine. This will happen when the machine is not capable of paying out the amount of money that you have won, an employee will present himself to you and give you the money by hand- if this happens you know you have won a lot.

Or, occasionally, the machine may not have enough tokens in it to reimburse you, in this case an employee will top you up with the correct amount of tokens, this is known as a partial payment.