A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A great article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can be found fantastic online slot gambling agency 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. Keep in mind, they may be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

On the contrary, 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 folks that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, and even more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There’s no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that will 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 exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, though the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true good thing about software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines can also 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 another machines. You can see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you will see that it rarely drops below 95% – which is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the standard. The truth is, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% – 98% range. This means that you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and on the standard it shall 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, remember, 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 is 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 nobody can guarantee a win every time. That’s just the nature of gambling, and that is a part of the thrill.