Tips for Winning on the Slot Machines

When it comes to slot machines there is no magic wand you can wave that will ensure your success, no easy ticket to a big fortune. There are, however, a number of things that you should bear in mind if you plan on spending a lot of time on these games, things that can help to ensure you limit your losses and secure regular wins.

In this article we will offer some tips on playing slots, tips that can help to turn you into a highly profitable player in no time.

Budget

The first thing you need to consider when playing a lot of slots is your budget. This applies in all forms of gambling, but more so in slots, where luck is the name of the game and where it’s easy to get carried away. To budget correctly, you simply need to work out how much money you can afford to lose every week. Don’t blow a weekly budget in a day, simply work out how much money you can afford to lose and how many days you will be playing per week, before breaking up your budget accordingly. This means that if I choose to budget for $200 a week and only play on weekends, then I should be losing no more than $100 both on Saturday and Sunday.

Time is just as important to budget as money. The last thing you want to do is spend hours and hours playing slots, because that’s when addictions are triggered and it’s a slippery slope from there. When you start to get angry or frustrated, stop playing and call it a night.

Promotions and Loyalty Bonuses

Once you have set a budget then you need to choose a site. Many players will move from one site to the next, taking as many welcome bonuses as they can in the process. This sounds like an ingenious way to get yourself into a profit, but it’s flawed. After all, if it wasn’t flawed then sites wouldn’t offer such big bonuses knowing that all players will leave as soon as they’re gone, and they wouldn’t make a profit from doing so if everyone was profiting from them.

The trick is to find one site that offers a big welcome bonus and continues to reward you even after that money has been depleted. There are many sites that do this. You should also look for a site with a great loyalty bonus. These are harder to find and we have only found one that truly fits our requirements (Spin Palace). This is because you don’t just want a loyalty bonus that will give you points every time you play and then allow you to turn those points into cash. Most casinos do this. What you want is a multi-tiered loyalty club that will give you more and more benefits the more you play. At Spin Palace, for instance, if you make it to the top level then you’ll get everything from free gifts to free tournament tickets, VIP access to sporting events and much more.

The same applies to offline casinos, only here you need to talk to the casino staff and wrangle yourself some perks. You will typically only get these if you are using the high-roller machines and betting big, but you can also score some nice perks through persistence alone.

Payout percentages

Not all slot machines are the same. What few players understand is that slots are not completely random, in the sense that they don’t decide to payout big one day, and then pay nothing at all the next. All slots have an in-built payout percentage which decides how much they will payout for every $100 that is paid into them. Of course, this is just an average, but it is a great indicator.

The average payout percentage for slots is between 97% and 99%, but there are some games that go as high as 99.60%. All these details are available online, just punch the name of the developer into Google, followed by the words “Slot Machines Payout Percentages”. Remember though that this doesn’t work for all developers. It will certainly work for Microgaming and Playtech, as well as developers like Betsoft, Net Ent and others, but for Realtime Gaming there is no standard payout percentage. This is because RTG, unlike other developers, allows the casinos that license their software to tweak the payout percentages.

This is why you should always check the details if you are playing on a casino that uses RTG.

Security and Trust

It goes without saying that you should only work with a casino that is trusted, established and secure. There are few “Scam” sites out there, but there are many sites that have poor security and poor customer service. You don’t want any delays with withdrawals and you certainly don’t want your financial or personal details to be exposed. You also want the guarantee that if you do win big, the casino will honor the payout.

Also, be sure to check that the casino uses reputable software, such as Playtech, Microgaming or Realtime Gaming. If not, the slots you’re playing on might be heavily weighted in favor of the casino. This has been known to happen in the past, with games that offer “Double or Nothing” features that actually only offer a 1 in 5 chance of winning, and games that ignore big wins and write them off as losses.

Nomadic Playing

There is no way of knowing the exact algorithm and the way that these slots work, but there is one trick that has always worked for us, and one that seems to go against what we have been told about how these machines work.

Basically, every time we play a slot for the first time, we tend to do very well. However, after we have played for some time, the wins dry up. We have noticed this time and time again and are not the only ones. Therefore, to get the most out of the slot machines, you should move around. Quit when you’re ahead, when the wins have been coming thick and fast but are then showing signs of slowing down. And then move on, repeating the process again and again.