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- Wpisy
A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based trusted slot game machines. An excellent 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 whole lot of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Of course, they may be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.
On the other hand, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside an extremely large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of folks 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 is no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that can be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each usage of the RNG is the same as the final use, and can be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, although the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true benefit of software-based online casino slots.
Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as low as 83%, which isn’t true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as the additional machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and you shall see that it rarely drops below 95% – that’s, the house makes a 5% profit, on the average. In fact, most casinos can document that their payout percentages will be in the 97% – 98% range. It means that you can spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and on the average it will cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And the high-paying win is balanced, bear in mind, 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 situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.
Players get better 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.
