Choosing a slot machine can be a hard choice. Though there are no direct strategies to win, choosing the right one can be a good choice, but the question is; how are you going to do that? There is no special trick for that and different people have varying thoughts and tactics to do that but some things are just universal.
When picking the right slot machine, some people would make the size of the jackpot part of their criteria. This is in fact important for anyone who's hunting for a slot machine to play. As you scan the different slot machines on a casino's floor, you'll find that there is a variety of jackpot sizes. Generally speaking, the slot machines with the enormous jackpot sizes, like the progressive jackpots for instance, are not always the right slot machine.

Picking The Right Slot Machine At A Casino
Picking The Right Slot Machine

The best you can do is just pick a slot that’s fun to play. Even though all slots work in the same basic manner, they come in all different types and styles. You have traditional reel slots, video slots complete with storylines and even 3D slots like those found at Bovada. It’s best to forget about getting an advantage when playing slots. If you wish to choose the right slot machine for you, you will have to know or determine your preference. Your preference must have something to do with the type of slot machines. Slot machines can be direct or progressive.

I went to a party Saturday night, and whenever I go to parties, someone inevitably learns what I do for a living. (I write about gambling.)

This always leads to one of two or three outcomes:

I hear a gambling anecdote about my new friend or one of their friends
My new friend asks me how to win money gambling. Sometimes they specifically ask how to choose the winning slot machine
Both #1 and #2 (this is actually the most common outcome)

I enjoy all these outcomes, by the way, but here’s what happened at this specific party.

A friend of mine started telling me the story of his friend who got fired from Walmart. Later the same day, his newly unemployed friend went to the Choctaw Casino in Durant and won $40,000 playing a slot machine.

My friend’s question to me was, “How do I do that?”

How can *I* choose the winning slot machine?

This post has the answer, but it’s almost certainly not what you’d think.

You Can’t Win by Choosing the Slot Machine With the Highest Payback Percentage.

When I search for this phrase in the most popular search engines, I see pages touting this advice repeatedly:

You have to play the slot machines with the highest payback percentage.

What’s a payback percentage?

It’s also called “return to player” or “RTP.”

A slot machine’s return is the amount of money paid out to a slot machine player compared to the amount of money the player wagered. The RTP gets expressed as a percentage.

If you made $100 in wagers on a slot machine and won $125, you’d have a return of 125%. If you won $90, you’d have a return of 90%.

The difference between the return and the amount you wagered, obviously, is the casino’s profit.

The payback percentage, or return to player (RTP), is a statistical prediction of a slot machine’s return over a massive number of spins. The closer you get to infinity, the closer the game’s results should get to the payback percentage that the game is programmed to have.

Players who win at slot machines win in the short run.

In the long run, all slot machines have a payback percentage of less than 100%. This means that, in the long run, you’ll always lose at slot machines.

How to Calculate the Payback Percentage of a Slot Machine

This theoretical payback percentage can get easily calculated if you have the probabilities behind the machine. It’s just the probability of each win multiplied by the amount of that win, divided by the amount you’d have to play every probability.

If, for example, a slot machine game had 10,000 possible combinations, and if you hit every combination, you’d win 9,000 coins, and the payback percentage would be 90%.

A slot machine doesn’t have to pay out less after a win to “catch up” to its payback percentage. Every spin of the reels on a slot machine is 100% random. The casino makes its profit because of the discrepancy between the odds of winning and the odds that each payout offers.

The payback percentage is not available to the consumer at most casinos. You have no way of calculating it because you have no way of knowing what the probability of getting a specific symbol on a stop is. You can’t calculate the probability of a combination of symbols without that information.

You have the payouts for the prizes, but you don’t know what your probability of winning those prizes is.

Where Does the Casino Put the Slot Machines With the Highest Payback Percentages?

You could play two identical slot machine games sitting right next to each other. One of them might have a payback percentage of 91%, while the other might have a payback percentage of 96%.

You have NO way of telling which machine is better than the other, even if one of those games is paying out more than the other. After all, the payback percentage is a long-term phenomenon.

In the short run, anything can happen.

But even if you DID know the payback percentage for the game, you couldn’t choose the winning slot machine just by choosing the one with the higher payback percentage.

The probability of winning the big jackpot on most machines is at least 1000 to 1.

If you play for two hours, you might make 1,200 spins. You might even win the big jackpot.

But you’ll (usually) have wagered more money on the machine than you won.

You’ll find advice about how to find the slot machines with the highest payback percentages, but most of it is useless. At one time, sure, the slot machines closest to the aisles might have had higher payback percentages.

However, I’ve seen multiple interviews with multiple casino managers who insist that isn’t true.

What About Playing Higher-Denomination Slot Machine Games?

You’ll also see people explain that the payback percentage on the higher-denomination machines is better. This is true as a general rule, but it might or might not be true at the casino where you’re playing. The penny and nickel machines might average 91% at your casino, while the dollar machines might average 95%, but that’s an AVERAGE.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically have a higher payback percentage just because you played a higher-denomination machine.

Even if you did, you’re still fighting a negative expectation game.

Should I Play Slot Machine Games With Higher Volatility?

What about volatility?
Is a slot machine with a higher volatility more likely to be a winner?
Or should I look for the games with lower volatility?

A slot machine’s volatility is its variance from the predicted results. The higher the volatility is on a game, the wider the swings between the wins and losses tend to be.

A game with high volatility pays out less often but can sometimes offer bigger payouts to compensate.

A game with low volatility pays out more often, but those payouts are still low enough to guarantee the casino a profit.

The slot machines at your local casino aren’t labeled according to their volatility, by the way. There’s not a special section for low volatility slots.

You can, though, get an idea for the volatility of a slot machine game via your observations of how often they pay out.

To make your own estimate, you need to count how many spins you make. You also need to count how many of those spins are winners (as opposed to losers).

Divide the number of winning spins by the number of spins you’ve made, and you’ll have the hit ratio for that sample set.

The more spins you’ve made, the more likely the hit ratio you’re seeing is close to the expected ratio.

If you make 500 spins on a game in an hour, and 150 of those spins are winners, the hit ratio for that game is 30%.

If 200 of them were winners, the hit ratio would be 40%.

The game with the 40% hit ratio is the less volatile game.

But keep in mind that an hour’s worth of spins is not representative of the long run. Those are still short-term results. The longer you play, the more accurate your results will get.

You COULD also estimate the slot machine’s actual return over those 500 spins.

Multiply the amount you wagered per spin by the number of s

Picking The Right Slot Machine