Slot machine questions about with new players. After all, they seem pretty straight forward and are less intimidating to approach on a casino floor. But if you decide to give slots a spin, you should at least brush up on the basics. So how do the one armed bandits actually work?
Slot machines used to be mechanical games powered by levers, springs, and spinning reels. Modern slot machines retain the lever and the spinning reels, but they’re both just for show, mostly. Today’s real money slots use computer-generated random results and display the reels on the symbols just for show.
You probably want more details than that, though, right? You’re probably even hoping for some math. Here you go: Each symbol on the virtual slot machine reels are programmed to come up a specific percentage of the time. This percentage is the weighting for that symbol. If you have 10 symbols, some of them might be programmed to come up 1/5 of the time, while others might be programmed to only come up 1/20 of the time. The rest might be programmed to come up 1/10 of the time.
The computer program generating these results is called a random number generator (RNG). Such a program is constantly cycling through numbers – thousands of numbers per second. Each of those numbers corresponds to the probability of a symbol coming up.
Does this mean slot machines are rigged? Only in a vague sense. Most people who think slot machines are rigged think that the casino controls when a slot machine pays out so that they can accomplish something nefarious. For example, they think that a slot machine that just paid out won’t pay out again for a while so that the game can “catch up” to its expected payback percentage. Sorry, that’s just not how the games work.
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