Feel the beat of big wins when you spin the reels of Dancing Drums slot machine by SHFL Entertainment. The Fu Babies are back and bringing you good fortune across 5-reels with 243 Ways to Win. The Jackpot Bonus can trigger when 1 or more WILD appears on screen, revealing a pick field with 12 coins.

New slot machine players are going to find a lot of advice for beating the slots. Have a healthy skepticism when a slots expert tells you they know how to beat the slot machines. Among the games in a casino, video slots (in general) have a high house edge. Besides finding gaming machines with high jackpots and a low house edge, no skill or strategy is required to play slots. That means you can’t expect to increase your odds of winning in most situations.

Read through the advice below to optimize your chances of winning at slots. None of the advice assures winning sessions. Instead, it helps you stretch your bankroll, so you enjoy playing the slots longer. Also, the longer your bankroll lasts, the more chances you’ll have of hitting the big jackpot every slots player wants.

Use a Slots Card

Upon entering a live casino, sign up for a slots card. This provides comps and cashback, which automatically lowers the house edge by a bit. Never play a spin without using your slots card. In an online casino, accept the highest slots bonus and play according to the terms and conditions until you meet the wagering requirement. Once again, this lowers the house edge on online slots.

Make Max Bets

Look at the payout chart on a slot machine to determine how jackpots are paid. On many slot machines, the 5-coin bet pays out a higher percentage on the top fixed jackpot. For instance, a 1-coin bet might pay $200, a 2-coin bet might pay $400, a 3-coin bet might pay $600, and a 4-coin bet might pay $800. You might expect the 5-coin bet to pay $1000, but many slot machines pay out $1200 or $1500 in that case, trying to convince bettors to make the max bet.

If the jackpot increases a bigger percentage with a maximum coin wager, then it makes sense to make the max bet on a slot machine. If the bet size is too high for your tastes, then lower the coin denomination and make a max bet at that level. Of course, if there is no additional jump between the 4-coin and 5-coin bet, then you can wager a single coin and max out the coin denomination to the bet size you like.

Read the RTP Information

If an online casino or land-based casino publishes its return-to-player information, read through the RTP percentages to find the video slots with the best RTPs. Return-to-player or expected return is the percentage of a theoretical $100 you expect to see returned to you. It is a theoretical percentage based on probability, so an RTP of 95% does not assure you’ll be paid $95 for every $100 you put in the machine. You might lose $50 or you might win $150, or you might win a progressive jackpot and go home rich.

The point of the RTP percentage is to give a player an idea of their expected return. If two slot machines sit next to one another and one has an RTP of 93% and the other an RTP of 95% (and both have similar jackpots), then it pays to play the game with the higher percentage. Over time, this leads to you maintaining a higher percentage of your bankroll.

Money Management Techniques

Read about bankroll management techniques. “Money management” or “bankroll management” is a series of steps you take to lock on winnings when good luck happens and limit your losses when a bad streak occurs. These do not assure that you’ll win, but it optimizes your bankroll.

Players should know three core bankroll management methods: percentage betting, win goals, and loss limits. Learn to calculate your bankroll and divide this into percentages. Then bet between 1% and 5% of your bankroll on any given hand, depending on your capacity for risk. This limits the amount of your stake you lose on any given session, keeping you playing for longer throughout your vacation. It is a given that people go to the ATM machine or credit card when they lose their whole bankroll — which means you spend more than you intended. The point of percentage betting is to assure your bankroll last through your whole trip, so you never have to replenish.

What Is a Bankroll?

“Bankroll” is not defined as your entire bank account. It isn’t defined as your discretionary spending budget or the money you have earmarked for entertainment expenses. Instead, it is a part of your discretionary spending cash and entertainment budget which is set aside specifically for gambling. In this case, a bankroll is less than your entertainment budget.

Once you have your bankroll figured, divide this into easy to understand percentage. If you have a bankroll of $1000, then divide this into percentages. These are simple calculations, but you should have an understanding of 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, and 20% of your bankroll. In the earlier example, 1% would be $10, while 2% would be $20. 5% would be $50, 10% would be $100, and 20% would be $200.

Now that you have these, decide whether to bet 1% to 5% of your bankroll. Most experts suggest betting no more than 1% to 2% in order to maintain your bankroll throughout your casino trip or online slots session.

Setting a Win Goal

Next, set your win goal. This is the amount of winnings you set as your goal for any given slots session. If you have a win goal of 10%, then your win goal would be $100 for any given slot machine sessions. As soon as you hit that goal, you walk away from the slot machine — no matter what. A win goal is a hard-and-fast rule, because it locks in winnings. One of the biggest mistakes players make is losing back their winnings, because they think they’re on a hot streak.

Setting a Loss Limit

Even more dangerous is trying to win back cash you just loss. To protect against this tendency, set a loss limit. Once again, make this your hard-and-fast rule. Typical loss limits can be 5%, 10%, 15%, or 20% — though 20% means you could lose the entire bankroll in 5 slots session. 10% to 15% is a good middle ground. Once you’ve lost that amount, walk away from the slot machine under all circumstances. The slots game is not “due” to pay out, so step away from the machine and clear your mind.

Win goals and loss limits guard against gambler’s fallacy. Gambler’s fallacy is the idea that the law of averages assures or weight the odds in your favor. Slots use random number generators and every spin is entirely separate from the previous spin. Losing the last spin does not make it more likely you’ll win the next spin. The odds stay the same, no matter how many wins or losses in a row you’ve had.

Avoid Progressive Betting

For that reason, avoid progressive betting systems like the Martingale system, D’Alembert system, Fibonacci system, and so on. Betting experts have used computer simulations to track the progressive betting methods against flat betting (same bet each spin). Flat betting beats all of the progressive betting schemes over 1 billion spins.

Progressive betting seems like it’s working, because it leads to a lot of small winning sessions. The problem is that it also has a handful of huge losing sessions which wipe out all the wins — and then some. You can’t beat the house edge with the Martingale system, however it might look to the naked eye. The Fibonacci numbers are incredible, but they are not a magical way to beat the casino.

The reason progressive bets are bad is they increase the size of your bets (in some systems exponentially). If you start with $5 or $10 bets, a streak of bad luck has you betting hundreds of dollars on one spin. That’s busts your bankroll and leads to a “risk of ruin” — meaning you’ll lose your whole bankroll if you hit a bad luck streak. No matter what you read online, flat bets are better.

Take Breaks for Rest and Refreshments

Play when you are at your best physically and mentally. Don’t play when you’re tired or sleepy. Don’t play when you’re hungry or thirsty. Take frequent rest and restroom breaks. If you get bored, take a break and walk the casino. Play another game to change up the betting pattern.

When you are rested and engaged, you won’t have distractions that might lead to bad decisions. The idea is to have fun, so if anything is causing you to lose focus on the entertainment aspect of the game, walk away and save your bankroll.

Don’t Go on Tilt

Tilt is a concept in poker where a player makes decisions based on emotional responses instead of solid strategy. It can cost a player a lot of money if they make bets based on anything but rational decisions. While going on tilt is not a concept in slot machine gambling, every game of chance has a personal component.

In short, don’t play when you’re agitated. Take stock of your inner thoughts. If your ego or anger is causing you to make irrational decisions, take a deep breath and calm down. If that doesn’t work, walk away and clear your head. It stinks to lose a series of bets, but what stinks more is to lose a series of bigger bets when you’re trying to make up for lost bankroll.

Have you ever wondered about how casino slot payouts work? Well, wonder no more! LadyLucks Casino have run the numbers and we can now explain how casinos generate their slot machine payouts.

We look at the difference between old mechanical slots and modern video slots, as well as going into detail about return to player rate (RTP) and slot volatility.

We’ll also discuss how all these factors can ultimately affect your slots payouts. So buckle up and get ready for some maths! It’s not too difficult though – we promise.

• 7Our Top 3 best slot machine payouts

Mechanical slots payouts

Mathematics and gambling have always been linked. Shrewd players hunt for ways to gain tiny advantages by utilising the facts and figures surrounding slot machine payouts, while casinos are searching for fresh mathematical tools that could help attract new players.

Slot machines were originally mechanical inventions. Let’s think of a classic three-reel fruit machine as our example, with only one payline. You win the top payout by landing three ‘lucky 7s’ in a row, where each reel has seven symbols in total.

The chance of hitting the jackpot is 1 in (7x7x7), aka 1 in 343 or about 0.29%. In order to make money, the casino has to offer a jackpot lower than that – say £300 for betting £1. But if you’re used to modern day video slots, you’ll know that’s a pretty paltry top prize.

If casinos want to offer a bigger payout, they have to ensure the chances of landing the jackpot are as small as possible. One way to increase the jackpot on offer is to up the number of symbols on the reels.

Changing from seven symbols to 12 per reel, decreases the slot machine payout odds to 1 in (12x12x12), which comes out to 1 in 1,728 or 0.06%. This allows the casino to set the jackpot at £1,700 – but it’s still not a huge amount of money, and has a very low chance of occurring.

Adapting the machine to a five-reel game adds a further two steps of multiplication to the calculation. Keeping the original seven-symbol reel, the chance of filling the payline with ‘lucky 7s’ suddenly jumps from 1 in 343 to 1 in 16,807 – so, in this case, the jackpot could reasonably increase to £16,000.

But if you think about the jackpots on offer from games today, they couldn’t utilise either of these methods. Imagine how many reels or symbols you’d need on a mechanical slot machine if you wanted to offer a jackpot worth hundreds of thousands!

The origin of random slots

Another problem with mechanical slot machines was the impossibility of randomising them properly. Some casinos hooked them up to a timer which determined when they would pay out, but gamblers soon learned to exploit this.

An example of this was professional blackjack and poker player Cat Hulbert: at one point, she employed teams of elderly contractors to play slots for her when they neared a payout time.

Slot machines were transformed in 1984 thanks to Norwegian mathematician Inge Telnaes. His big idea was that, instead of spinning actual reels, a random number generator should dictate the results. You could create a visual representation of the slots and show either a winning combination or a random collection of losing symbols.

The random number generator could be programmed to offer odds that reels themselves can’t, and so you can offer much longer odds on winning combinations. IGT purchased Telnaes’ patent back in 1989, and thus earned royalties as other companies started using the random number model too.

Whilst creating truly random numbers can be impossible, the pseudo-randomness that most random number generators offer is usually good enough. The strings of numbers which are generated can usually create long runs with many random properties.

You can also manipulate the randomness of the numbers, though this must be accurately reflected by the return to player (RTP) listed on the machine.

How return to player rate works

Every slot you play online will have a RTP listed with it. This is typically somewhere between 92% and 98% and represents, in simulations, how much players will expect to receive back after an extended run of play.

In this case, the player would be set to walk away with £98 in their pocket. However, that’s far from the truth.

Slot machines are very rigorously tested and spun thousands upon thousands of times to ensure their advertised RTP is correct. If you ever feel like you’re not seeing the RTP advertised on them, it’s due to sheer randomness – and the weighting of jackpots, as you’ll see when we break down a slot in the next section.

A similar example to help wrap your head around this is flipping coins: you know that it’s a 50% chance to land heads or tails, but that’s over one flip. In 100 coin flips, you only actually have an 8% chance of having 50 heads and 50 tails.

Using binomial expansion, you can work out what the chance of this happening is – so, if you repeated the 100 flips 100 times, how many of those sets would actually have the perfect 50-50 split? The answer is 8%.

But if you look at how many sets come out as close to 50% – say with between 40 to 60 heads – then the probability of this is much higher. The maths behind this is fairly complicated, but you can use a binomial calculator to prove it: the chance of success is 0.5, there are 100 trials, and 50 successes. You actually end up with a 7.96% of succeeding.

Use this as a reference for how unlikely perfect averages are: if you only get a perfect 50/50 split when flipping a coin 8% of the time, then think about how many different variations there are in a slot machine full of different symbols and stops. You would need a massive amount of time to see the average number overpower the inherent unpredictability of the random number generator.

Slot payouts’ percentage are worked out over a huge amount of time and a long string of spins. You need lots of spins to work out the average without being affected by the slot volatility.

The longer you play a slot for, the nearer you will get to that elusive RTP figure – but your bankroll would have to be enormous to actually see it work out!

It’d be much more reasonable to think of RTPs as expectations for millionaires: if you paid £1 million into a slot machine, you could expect to see £980,000 back from it.

Obviously, no one person puts that in as one lump, but the machine might get that paid into it, in total, over the course of its lifetime. So the machine keeps £20,000 of the money that’s put in, assuming everything perfectly adheres to mathematical models.

Understanding slot payout : breaking down a simple slot

So now we know a bit about slots, let’s look at the maths behind the payouts. This is a very simple example, and it uses our three-reel, seven-symbol, one-payline slot that we outlined in the first section.

For ease of argument, there are no special features here, no wild symbols, and no scatters. All of the paying combinations have to be found left-to-right in order to trigger the slot payout.

The Slot payouts are going to be as follows:

• 3 Lucky 7s = £100
• 3 of any other symbol = £10
• 2 Lucky 7s = £10
• 2 of any other symbol = £3

Dancing Drums Slot Machine Payout Chart 2018

There’s only one combination you can get to win the top prize, but we’ve introduced further methods of winning too. Three of any other symbol has six combinations, as does the chance of spinning two Lucky 7s. But two of any other symbol is much more common, as there’s 36 ways that might show up in the slot machine.

Out of 343 combinations, only 49 in total (1+6+6+36) yield a reward, which only provides a 14.3% chance of pulling up a winning spin. However, that improbability is balanced out by higher wins.

If you multiply the number of combinations that can win by the number of coins you’d win, you come up with your potential pay-off per coin:

• 3 Lucky 7s = 1 x £100 = 100
• 3 of any other symbol = 6 x £10 = 60
• 2 Lucky 7s = 6 x £10 = 60
• 2 of any other symbol = 36 x £3 = 108

And adding these figures together gives us the total number of coins we could win from this spin

100 + 60 + 60 + 108 = 328

Divide this by the total number of spins – 343 – and times the result by 100, and we get the slot payout percentage:

(328 / 343) x 100 = 95.6%

With this slot, someone could come along and assume that putting £100 into this slot would give them a return of £95.60. However, looking at the maths behind it, we know that this isn’t necessarily true.

It would be more accurate to think that a millionaire putting £1 million into it could walk away with £956,000 – and that the slot machine keeps the remaining £44,000 that it won through house edge.

What about slot volatility?

Slot volatility has a huge effect on how people play games. You can target different groups by changing a slot’s volatility up or down, though this might be represented by the same RTP.

A low volatility slot will reliably pay out small amounts over and over, and is ideal for players who want to keep spending their bankroll without too much chance of losing it all.

However, high volatility slots are the ones with huge jackpots: they’re designed to draw you in for a quick shot at winning big money with the understanding it’s very unlikely.

In our Lucky 7s slots, we can safely say that it has high volatility. Only 14.3% of spins will yield a winning combination; so, if you spin the slot 1,000 times, you’ll only be mathematically expected to trigger 143 wins.

However, the draw of the jackpot – £100 for a single perfect combination – mitigates this. There’s still a high return on investment because of the significant boost that rolling a top prize gives.

Slots with many paylines and different distributions of symbols are much more complicated to calculate, but the principle remains the same.

If big wins make up the bulk of the reward, it’s high volatility; if your slot payouts come from small and frequent wins, then it’s low volatility. And both high and low-volatility slots can vary in their advertised RTP.

Slot Machine Payout Chart

Scaling returns

The final, minor point to make about slot machine maths is that some machines have scaling returns. If you ever see RTP shown as a range rather than as a single figure, it implies the slot you are playing on has different payout chances – and this usually depends on the amount of money you stake.

Consider a progressive slot game, where much of the RTP is made up of the small chance of landing a huge jackpot, there may be a higher chance of triggering the top prize if you stake more. This also means that you’re putting up more money to lose, but it does technically change the casino’s edge.

Even if you only tilt the slot payout percentage a little bit – by 1% or 2% – the increased earnings on the slot can offset the larger wins, especially as many people may exhaust their bankroll into the machine without winning big money.

Scaling returns are a more common phenomenon in land-based casinos. Online casinos tend to be more consistent across all denominations, to ensure they don’t unfairly privilege high rollers.

Our Top 3 best slot machine payouts

Now you understand the maths behind slots, why not put your theoretical knowledge to the test?

Book of Dead

Since its launch in 2016, Play’n GO’s Book of Dead has become a must-play slot that you’ve probably seen appear in many top rankings as it is quite simply one of the best slots ever created!

With this game, Play’n GO has managed to capture the style of bonus features that thrill us.

The Wild symbol is also the trigger symbol for bonus games (Scatter) and is represented by the Guestbook. Knowing that each book can replace any other symbol in the game, this can only increase the winnings.

And you’re not done winning yet, because a random bonus feature will also pop up. This time during the Book of Dead free spins game.

Finally, to finish convincing you, Book of Dead has a fixed jackpot of £250,000!

Quest to the West

With a RTP of 97.53%, Quest To The West slot is a very recent game that is well above average! The game is still a highly volatile online video slot game that offers superb payouts alternating with periods that won’t pay too much.

This slot machine favours small players or those who like to be in control and not risk too much on their bets, which is important in order to play responsibly.

Although it may seem overly simple compared to other slots that have multiple features and special symbols, Quest To The West has real potential for winning.

Megaways™ slots

The Megaways™ slot machines are innovative, fun and feature extremely smooth animations and highly detailed graphics.

But above all what attracts players is the Megaways™ system, created by Big Time Gaming and later used by other developers, which offers players the possibility to play on slot machines with multiple pay lines, up to 117,649 ways to win, such as the Extra Chilli slot.

Big Time Gaming has gone one step further, offering 586,971 ways to win on the superb Holy Diver slot, which also includes the revolutionary Reel Adventure game mechanism.

And to top it all off, Big Time Gaming’s slots can offer you an average of up to 20,000x your bet!

If you want to get the best slot payouts in the UK on online casinos, check out some of the great games available at LadyLucks Casino. We’ve got a great range of slot reviews you can enjoy, with a variety of paylines, slot volatility or RTP to suit every kind of player.