Best Slot 23
A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A superb article by Steve Bourie is titled, "Are Slot Machines Honest?" and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It may be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a lot of "variations" (being polite) than can deceive the player. Remember, they may be all illegal and don't happen. But read the article, closely.
Conversely, online casino slots use an electronic "random number generator" or RNG, operating inside a very large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of people that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that don't change. There's absolutely no "sense switch" (see the Bourie article) that can be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG is equivalent to the last use, and will be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, though the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.
Land-based slot machines can also have payout percentages as little as 83%, which is just not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the other machines. You may see the payout percentages click for source many online gaming sites, and you will see that it rarely drops below 95% - that is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the normal. Actually, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are within the 97% - 98% range. This means you may spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and also on the regular it's going to cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the high-paying win. And the high-paying win is balanced, of course, by a number of players who lose and finance that win.
So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. That's a far cry from the specific situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called "one-armed bandits".
Players improve odds, they get absolute consistency across all games - but no one can guarantee a win every time. That is just the nature of gambling, and that's involved in the thrill.
