Slot games started out as big machines with drums that spun symbols around when people pulled a long lever. These one-arm bandits couldn’t be further from how the games that you know and love, work today. Today’s slot games can be found online or via slot apps, just like the games you can find at House of Fun. These work with a click of the mouse or a swipe and tap of the smartphone screen and you certainly can’t see drums of the reels spinning around. Of course, there is plenty going on behind the scenes to make sure that you can enjoy a fun and exciting game with great sound effects and graphics, unique features and mini games and even progressive jackpots. Here we’ll look at the guts of the mobile and online slot machines that we have all grown to love in order to understand how they are designed and how they work.
- How Does Free Slot Play Work At Casinos
- How Does Free Slot Play Work At Casinos
- Slot Machines How They Work
- Free Slot Play Mecca
Choose your preferred online slot machine and open the game on your chosen device. The screen will fill with the reels of your slot machine and operating buttons such as ‘spin’ and ‘max bet’. Free Slot Play is non-transferable, cannot be converted to cash and must be played at a slot machine before other credits. Once you have downloaded Free Slot Play, you must play at that machine. The amount you select to play must be divisible by the denomination at play. Mohegan Sun is not responsible for abandoned Free Slot Play. Choose your preferred online slot machine and open the game on your chosen device. The screen will fill with the reels of your slot machine and operating buttons such as ‘spin’ and ‘max bet’.
The Ins and Outs of Video Slots
When slot games first moved online in the 1990s, people were nervous of a game where they couldn’t see the actual reels spinning. But, the way that these games work has proved to players that they are not only fun, but fair and reliable.
The most important part of the way that video slot games work is the Random Number Generator (RNG) and here’s where it gets a bit technical. The RNG produces a constantly random sequence of numbers. When you click spin, that sequence will stop, telling the symbols where to land. This means that the symbols will land in a random way every time you spin.
How is the Random Number Generator Random?
The RNG does not have a memory so it can’t remember if you’ve won or lost in the past and it can’t remember how the symbols landed on the reels on past spins. It works with a mathematical equation, but the results are not pre-programmed.
The RNG is constantly producing numbers so that each time you press the Spin button, the sequence will be different. In other words, no 2 spins will be the same, giving you a unique playing experience every time you sit down to play!
How Does a Slots Game Work?
The RNG is the guts of the slot machine; it’s behind the scenes and we don’t see it. Let’s take a look now at the parts of the slot games that we do see.
- Reels – There are slot games that aim for a more authentic look and feel and these have 3 reels, similar to the original land-based machines. These are known as classic slots or fruit machines. More common are the video slots and these generally have 5 reels, although you may find games with 6 reels. These are the types of games you will find at House of Fun.
- Paylines – This describes how many lines of combinations of symbols there are in the game and also explains how many chances you have to win as you play. Video slots games generally have between 5 and 50 paylines, but there are games with more. You can choose how many paylines you want to play and this will affect the size of your bet. You will only be paid out for combinations that land on active paylines so the more paylines you bet on, the bigger your chances of winning!
- Rows – The number of rows in a game describes how many symbols there are visible on each reel at a time. Online slot machines most commonly have 3 rows, but 4 is not unusual. At House of Fun, during some bonus features, the number of rows increases to give you even more opportunities to create winning combinations!
- Ways to Win – Some games do not have paylines, but they have something called Ways to Win. These Ways to Win are calculated by how symbols land with respect to other symbols. Games commonly have 243 or 1,024 ways to win. If a game increases its number of rows, such as during the free spins feature of some of House of Fun’s games, the number of Ways to Win will go up.
- Features – Features are what make games unique and fun. At House of Fun, there is an incredible range of features, including free spins, mini games, gold symbols, progressive jackpots, Classic Star jackpots, Rapid Fire jackpots and more.
How Mobile Slots are Unique
Mobile slots use the same RNG as online slot machines so whether you are playing on your computer or on a mobile device, every spin will be unique and fair. The games also look the same as online slot machines with great graphics and sounds, unique features and impressive bonus games. But, at House of Fun, we know you love to play on the go and have your favorite games right in your pocket with you, so we have developed our games to be played on mobile devices also. These games are designed to fit perfectly onto a smartphone or tablet screen with a specific layout and display that suits the size of the screens. The swipe and tap features of mobile devices are also perfect for slots play and these are incorporated for intuitive and simple playing. Not only that, but mobile players will have access to the same incredible progressive jackpots as online players.
Playing Slots via Mobile – The Final Say
For slots lovers, mobile slots are a windfall! Slots apps, such as House of Fun, allow you to carry around your favorite slot games wherever you go. You can whip out your smartphone or tablet whenever you have a few minutes and play games that have been especially designed for your mobile device. These have all the fairness and randomness of online slot machines, as well as all the great bonuses and features that players have come to love. If you’re wondering whether it is a good idea to play slots via mobile, the answer is a resounding yes! Simply collect your free coins and start spinning the reels to win!
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.
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.
How Does Free Slot Play Work At Casinos
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.
How Does Free Slot Play Work At Casinos
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.
Slot Machines How They Work
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.
Free Slot Play Mecca
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.