Pay Tables Slot Machines

Before playing a slot machine game for the first time, we highly recommend checking out the machine’s pay table and familiarizing yourself with the paylines. Depending on the machine, the pay table can be confusing, especially if you are new to playing on slots. The table can be jam-packed with info, and it isn’t always presented in a way that is clear for newbies. So, to simplify the matter, we are going to show the most important things to look for on a slot machine’s pay table.

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What Is a Pay Table?

A pay table gives slot machine players helpful information regarding the game. You can access it by pressing a button marked with a question mark or an information symbol.

Typically, a pay table will contain the following pieces of information:

  • Game rules
  • Symbols and their corresponding values
  • Bonus features
  • Conditions for winning free spins
  • Jackpot details
  • Payline Information

In many cases, the pay table will be multiple pages long, so be sure to look for the Next or Forward button.

Game Rules

The game rules portion of the pay table will tell players the basic rules, such as what buttons to push, what actions to take, and what conditions are needed to win. You can see an example of the Lion’s Pride “Gamble Rules” section at the bottom of the pay table.

Symbols and Their Corresponding Values

On the same Lion’s Pride pay table, you can see each symbol in the game and how much their base pay is when they appear on the reels. The table shows the payout when 3, 4, and 5 symbols appear. Furthermore, the screen gives the information that the wins are multiplied by the number of coins bet per line. However, it also states that scatter wins are instead multiplied by the total bet.

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This information will vary highly from game to game, so be sure to read the given information carefully.

Bonus Features

Pay Table Slot Machine

One beloved component of modern slot machines are their engaging bonus features. Bonus games are different from the regular slot machine game and give players an opportunity to rake in more winnings. Some bonus games are simple, while others can be more complicated and utilize advanced mechanics. To be fully prepared, be sure to read the bonus section of your slot machine’s pay table.

For example, in Wild North, you could unlock the Northern Lights bonus game. According to Wild North’s pay table, 20 tiles will appear on the screen, and you reveal one tile. Depending on the tile you reveal, you will either end the bonus game or get to continue on and reveal additional tiles. With each round of the game, you will get to spin the bonus wheel or either win cash prizes or another bonus feature.

Conditions for Winning Free Spins

One fun part of playing a slot game is the opportunity to rack up free spins, which increase your chances of winning. Games have different conditions for winning free spins, so be sure to check the pay table. For instance, in Lion’s Pride, players need to receive 3+ mask symbols in order to trigger free spins. They could win up to 25 free spins, and each winning spin would have a randomly awarded multiplier. In addition to this, free spins have the ability to be retriggered in this particular slot game.

Jackpot Details

The pay table will also give the player relevant information about the game’s jackpot, namely what symbol triggers the jackpot payout and how many of that symbol needs to be on an active payline.

In the picture below, the King Cashalot pay table shows that you need to get 5 king symbols on the 9th reel in order to win the progressive jackpot. You also need to place the maximum bet in order to qualify to receive the jackpot prize.

Paylines

Finally, the pay table will include information about the game’s paylines. A payline is a line on which reel symbols need to fall in order for you to receive winnings. In most cases, you will have to place a specified wager in order to activate all paylines. It would be in your best interest to place the maximum bet because this guarantees that all paylines would be activated. Think of how devastating it would be for you to land a fantastic winning combination on an inactive payline!

Here is an example of a diagram you might see on a multi-payline slot machine’s pay table.

Types of Pay Lines

On the pay table, you will see in which direction the paylines are oriented. To briefly touch on the terminology, here is what you might see:

Left to Right: This is the most common direction that you will find on a slot machine. When wins begin left to right, this means that symbols need to start matching from the reel furthest to the left. Any subsequent symbols will need to match from left to right.

Right to Left: This is the opposite of a left to right payline. The first symbol needs to be all the way to the right, and the succession continues leftward.

Pay Both Ways: Interestingly enough, there are very few slot machines that solely pay right to left. If you see that it pays right to left, it is likely that it also pays left to right. If this is the case, then we would say that the payline pays both ways.

All Ways: In this type of payline alignment, you just need to have a matching symbol on every reel. This is much easier to hit than in a single-direction payline game. All Ways paylines give you access to a large number of ways to win. The most common scenario will be 243 paylines across the reels.

Cluster Pays: This type of payline is very different from the others. With this kind, symbol need to appear on the reels in clusters. Usually the clusters must be groups of either 3 or 5 symbols. Here is an example of a cluster payline:

Now that you know how to read a pay table, come check out our vast library of slot games! Our games have fun symbols, catchy music, and engaging bonus features, so you are sure to find a game that you will love.

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The gaming industry is big business in the US, contributing an estimated $240 billion to the economy each year while generating $38 billion in tax revenues and supporting 17 million jobs.

What people may not realize is that slot machines, video poker machines, and other electronic gaming devices make up the bulk of all that economic activity. At casinos in Iowa and South Dakota, for example, such devices have contributed up to 89 percent of annual gaming revenue.

Spinning-reel slots, in particular, are profit juggernauts for most casinos, outperforming table games like blackjack, video poker machines, and other forms of gambling.

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What about slot machines makes them such reliable money makers? In part, it has something to do with casinos’ ability to hide their true price from even the savviest of gamblers.

The Price of a Slot

An important economic theory holds that when the price of something goes up, demand for it tends to fall.

But that depends on price transparency, which exists for most of the day-to-day purchases we make. That is, other than visits to the doctor’s office and possibly the auto mechanic, we know the price of most products and services before we decide to pay for them.

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Slots may be even worse than the doctor’s office, in that most of us will never know the true price of our wagers. Which means the law of supply and demand breaks down.

Casino operators usually think of price in terms of what is known as the average or expected house advantage on each bet placed by players. Basically, it’s the long-term edge that is built into the game. For an individual player, his or her limited interaction with the game will result in a “price” that looks a lot different.

For example, consider a game with a 10-percent house advantage — which is fairly typical. This means that over the long run, the game will return 10 percent of all wagers it accepts to the casino that owns it. So if it accepts $1 million in wagers over 2 million spins, it would be expected to pay out $900,000, resulting in a casino gain of $100,000. Thus, from the management’s perspective, the “price” it charges is the 10 percent it expects to collect from gamblers over time.

Individual players, however, will likely define price as the cost of the spin. For example, if a player bets $1, spins the reels, and receives no payout, that’ll be the price — not 10 cents.

So who is correct? Both, in a way. While the game has certainly collected $1 from the player, management knows that eventually 90 cents of that will be dispensed to other players.

A player could never know this, however, given he will only be playing for an hour or two, during which he may hope a large payout will make up for his many losses and then some. And at this rate of play, it could take years of playing a single slot machine for the casino’s long-term advantage to become evident.

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Short-Term vs. Long-Term

This difference in price perspective is rooted in the gap between the short-term view of the players and the long-term view of management. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned in my more than three decades in the gambling industry analyzing the performance of casino games and as a researcher studying them.

Let’s consider George, who just got his paycheck and heads to the casino with $80 to spend over an hour on a Tuesday night. There are basically three outcomes: He loses everything, hits a considerable jackpot and wins big, or makes or loses a little but manages to walk away before the odds turn decidedly against him.

Of course, the first outcome is far more common than the other two — it has to be for the casino to maintain its house advantage. The funds to pay big jackpots come from frequent losers (who get wiped out). Without all these losers, there can be no big winners — which is why so many people play in the first place.

Specifically, the sum of all the individual losses is used to fund the big jackpots. Therefore, to provide enticing jackpots, many players must lose all of their Tuesday night bankroll.

What is less obvious to many is that the long-term experience rarely occurs at the player level. That is, players rarely lose their $80 in a uniform manner (that is, a rate of 10 percent per spin). If this were the typical slot experience, it would be predictably disappointing. But it would make it very easy for a player to identify the price he’s paying.

Raising the Price

Ultimately, the casino is selling excitement, which is comprised of hope and variance. Even though a slot may have a modest house advantage from management’s perspective, such as four percent, it can and often does win all of George’s Tuesday night bankroll in short order.

This is primarily due to the variance in the slot machine’s pay table — which lists all the winning symbol combinations and the number of credits awarded for each one. While the pay table is visible to the player, the probability of producing each winning symbol combination remains hidden. Of course, these probabilities are a critical determinant of the house advantage — that is, the long-term price of the wager.

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This rare ability to hide the price of a good or service offers an opportunity for casino management to raise the price without notifying the players — if they can get away with it.

Casino managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize their all-important slot revenue, but they do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the “price” too much. If players are able to detect these concealed price increases simply by playing the games, then they may choose to play at another casino.

This terrifies casino operators, as it is difficult and expensive to recover from perceptions of a high-priced slot product.

Getting Away With It

Consequently, many operators resist increasing the house advantages of their slot machines, believing that players can detect these price shocks.

Our new research, however, has found that increases in the casino advantage have produced significant gains in revenue with no signs of detection even by savvy players. In multiple comparisons of two otherwise identical reel games, the high-priced games produced significantly greater revenue for the casino. These findings were confirmed in a second study.

Further analysis revealed no evidence of play migration from the high-priced games, despite the fact their low-priced counterparts were located a mere three feet away.

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Importantly, these results occurred in spite of the egregious economic disincentive to play the high-priced games. That is, the visible pay tables were identical on both the high- and low-priced games, within each of the two-game pairings. The only difference was the concealed probabilities of each payout.

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Armed with this knowledge, management may be more willing to increase prices. And for price-sensitive gamblers, reel slot machines may become something to avoid.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Anthony Frederick Lucas. Read the original article here.