Go to any modern casino – either a brick and mortar one or online – and the vast majority of the games available will be slots.
Not only are they the most common, they’re also the most popular.
There are plenty of reasons for this but the main one is just how simple they are to play. You just choose your stake and let those reels roll. To make them even more enjoyable they are available with virtually any theme you can imagine.
From music to movies, Ancient Egypt to the Emerald Isle and its pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all these and more are represented.
But there are two very important aspects to understand about any slots game before you begin to play – and they’re also going to affect your choice of which games to play..
These are a game’s RTP and its volatility. While not directly connected, they do work together to define what kind of slot it is.
Return To Player explained
For the uninitiated, the Return To Player, or RTP, can be something of a misleading term. One could understand it to mean the amount that you will win back when you play a certain slot, but that would undermine the essential excitement and unpredictability of playing slots.
Yes, it does mean the amount of stake money that is paid out in prizes. But this is judged over an extended period, typically 100,000 spins – many more than any one player would ever have in a single session.
The RTP of a slots game is presented as a percentage – typically between 92% and 98%. If a game is at the lower end of the scale 8% of the stake money will be kept by the casino operator, at the higher end it’s 2%. This goes down as nominal profit for the casino, although a proportion of this profit will go towards the casino’s operating costs.
While reputable casinos will always be upfront about a game’s RTP there are other ways that they reveal themselves. It tends to work out that games with a high RTP will tend to pay out more frequent, lower prizes while those with a low one will offer fewer, bigger payouts.
Volatility defined
Linked, but not directly connected, to a game’s RTP is its level of volatility, also sometimes known as its variance.
There are four categories of volatility, high, medium, low medium and low. At the top end, a high volatility game will make fewer, higher payouts. As we move down the scale the size of prizes decreases and the frequency of wins increases.
At this point you may be wondering what controls these two factors in a slots game. The answer is the precise algorithm that the game’s random number generator uses. This can be programmed to work within certain parameters that can combine unpredictable results with a level of control needed to define the size and frequency of payouts.
Given that modern slots include so many variables, from multiple paylines to in-game multipliers, free spins and bonus rounds, the creation of these algorithms is unbelievably complex and involved.
A slot’s volatility is unlikely to be widely advertised by the casino, but you can get a good idea from reading online reviews of a particular title.
Choosing which to play
When deciding whether to go all in with a highly volatile game or to head for the opposite extreme it’s very much a case of personal preference.
One indicator can be by thinking about what kind of gambler you are at heart. For someone who enjoys the thrill of betting on a horse at long odds or putting all their chips on a single number at the roulette table then a high volatility slot would be the natural choice.
On the other hand, someone who feels more comfortable with even money bets is more attuned to low volatility games. If their bankroll is limited, then this is also the logical way to go.
What a player will not be able to find very easily is a high volatility slot that also has a high RTP as the two features are generally mutually exclusive. However, in the low medium and medium volatility categories it’s possible to find a happy compromise.
The principles of playing any kind of slot remain broadly the same. One should always keep a tight control of the bankroll and never bet amounts that you can’t afford to lose. It’s also a good strategy to stick with the same game even after a string of losing spins.
That’s because there’s no such thing as a game being on a losing or a winning streak. Every spin is unique and completely unrelated to what has gone before.
That, after all, is the unpredictable beauty of playing the slots.
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