When people call slot machines 'loose' and 'tight' they're referring to the payout percentage. A looser machine pays out more often and at a higher percentage while a tighter machine has a lower RTP and pays out less frequently. The looser the slots, the better it is for the player.
The gaming industry is big business in the U.S., contributing an estimated US$240 billion to the economy each year, while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 million jobs.
What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.
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Spinning-reel slots in particular are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines and other forms of gambling.
What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.
The price of a slot
An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.
But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.
Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.
Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or expected house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.
For example, consider a game with a 10 percent house advantage – which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $900,000, resulting in a casino gain of $100,000. Thus from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.
Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels and receives no payout, that’ll be the price – not 10 cents.
So who is correct? Both, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.
A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.
Short-term vs. long-term
This difference in price perspective is rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.
Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.
Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two – it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners – which is why so many people play in the first place.
Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.
What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.
Raising the price
Ultimately, the casino is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope and variance. Even though a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, such as 4 percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.
This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table – which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table is visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination remains hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage – that is, the long-term price of the wager.
This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players – if they can get away with it.
Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.
This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.
Getting away with it
Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, believing that players can detect these price shocks.
Our new research, however, has found that increases in the casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.
Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere 3 feet away.
Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within each of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.
Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. And for price-sensitive gamblers, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.
What if — one day — you entered a slot machine bonus round and walked out $15,000,000 richer? For some lucky players, that has actually happened.
Long gone are the days when you spun 3 reels with fruit symbols on them and won a few free spins as a bonus round. These days, there are all sorts of awesome, entertaining bonus rounds which make video slots appear more like video games.
I’ve played thousands of slots in my time, and thousands of bonus rounds, too. I’m going to share the best I’ve encountered here.
Unsurprisingly, most of them give you the chance to win huge amounts of cash, which is part of what makes them so great to begin with!
The Mega Fortune Bonus Wheel
When it comes to slot machine bonus wheels, most people think of Mega Moolah by Microgaming first. While that is a pretty cool feature, I personally think the Mega Fortune bonus wheel is slightly better.
This is a feature that will get your adrenaline pumping for sure. It’s a multi-layered wheel with cash prizes and several progressive jackpots up for grabs.
So, how do you win the Mega Jackpot and walk away a millionaire? Each time the wheel spins, you need to land on an arrow to proceed to the next layer. If you make it all the way to the center, you can officially call yourself filthy rich.
This feature can actually be triggered fairly often in Mega Fortune. A few days ago I was able to unlock it 3 times within the same quick session.
The Scary Rich 3 Free Spins Round
Unless you’re a hardcore slots player like myself, you might never have heard of Scary Rich 3 from Rival Gaming.
It’s a horror-themed slot which is relatively unremarkable overall, apart from the cracking free spins bonus round. If you manage to trigger it with 5 scatter symbols you will get 666 free spins, which I can tell you from experience takes around half an hour to play through.
While that’s a heck of a lot of free spins and is enough to make this bonus round noteworthy by itself, there are also expanding wilds in play throughout. These significantly increase your chances of making winning combinations.
As I said before, it’s one of those slots few have heard of, but I have personally never seen another slot offering as many free spins in one feature.
The Avalon II Grail Bonus Feature
Sometimes a bonus feature is actually multiple bonus rounds all rolled into one, and that’s the case with the Grail feature in Avalon II from Microgaming.
If you manage to trigger this feature, you will have 8 different entertaining possibilities. There’s a dice roll game, 3 free spins rounds with up to 20 free spins and dynamic multipliers in one of them, 2 picking rounds with up to 160x your stake available, a fighting game with cash prizes, and a bonus wheel round, all within one feature.
This feature also has somewhat of a storyline to it, in which you need to retrieve ”the grail” and bring it back to Avalon. It’s got epic graphics and sound effects, which I have come to expect from Microgaming.
Why do I like this feature so much? Because it doesn’t get boring even when you trigger it multiple times within the same game. Oh, and you can win serious money, too.
The Breakaway Free Spins Round
Breakaway is an ice hockey themed game from Microgaming. It’s got loads of extra features, but the one which stands out most to me is the free spins round.
There are up to 25 free spins offered, which is nothing remarkable in and of itself, but all wins are instantly boosted 1,000% by a 10x multiplier.
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Breakaway has a 125,000-coin jackpot, which is also worth playing for. Still, this is all about bonus rounds, and I definitely want to mention the free spins round here. Multipliers of 2x and 3x are common, but 10x deserves a special mention.
If the ice hockey theme doesn’t appeal, then either Football Star or Rugby Star also have free spins rounds with 10x multipliers. Check them out.
The Hall of Gods Picking Feature
Hall of Gods by NetEnt takes you back to the mythical era when Odin, Loki, and Thor ruled the minds of the Nordic people.
Thor’s hammer is a symbol we still recognize today, and it’s an important one in this bonus feature. How it works is that you take Thor’s hammer and smash various shields on the screen for cash prizes.
What makes this relatively simple feature so special? The fact that you can win millions instantly by finding one of the Hall of Gods progressive jackpots behind the shield you smash.
This feature has the power to make you a millionaire in a few seconds flat, and I think that makes it special, even if I haven’t yet had the good fortune to win it.
The Gonzo’s Quest Avalanche Reels
Gonzo’s Quest is one of NetEnt’s most popular slots of all time. It’s a simple game, but it has one brilliant feature I really like.
The “Avalanche Reels” make it possible to win multiple consecutive times off one single spin. This means that when you create a winning combination, the symbols involved disappear and are replaced by new ones, potentially unlimited times in a row.
While this is not totally unique in itself, Gonzo’s Quest adds extra spice to the rice by adding a dynamic multiplier element. For each consecutive win, a multiplier will increase by 1x, up to a maximum of 5x.
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Just imagine 5 wins in a row from one spin, with the fifth win boosted 500% automatically (after all the others). That’s why this feature deserves to be included on this list, in my view.
The Mega Moolah Bonus Wheel
There’s no rule against having two entries for great slots bonus wheels, right?
While I stated clearly above that I feel the Mega Fortune bonus wheel is the best of the lot, the Mega Moolah one is still pretty immense.
This is more of a traditional bonus wheel, meaning there is just one layer to it. There are 4 progressive jackpots which can be won, starting with the Mini and going all the way up to the Mega.
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If you’re lucky enough to land the Mega jackpot, welcome to the millionaire’s club! Mega Moolah is renowned for paying out ridiculous jackpots more suitable for a state or national lotto draw than a slot machine.