I love slots with plenty of excitin’ bonus features! Not only do they give a game a ‘twist’ but they’re also great ways to try and boost your final pay-out for a tastier treat. Slot bonuses can come in all kinds of styles and you usually trigger ‘em by landin’ bonus symbols (but not always!). The core principle of slot machines, is to provide a random outcome for slot players – very similar to other casino table games. Take for example the game of blackjack. In blackjack the cards are drawn randomly and the outcome is unknown (not only for the player, but to everyone including dealer).

Most amateur gamblers believe that if a slot machine hits the jackpot, then it immediately goes ‘cold’. They also believe the opposite is true; if a machine runs cold for hours, then it’s ‘due’ for a big payoff. But if you look inside modern slot machines, you learn the cold hard truth. Every single pull of the lever has equal odds of winning, and those odds are steep.

How Does Slot Machine Work

Since the earliest mechanical slot machines, gaming manufacturers have weighted the machines to tweak the odds. If you look closely at the reels of old machines, you’ll find many more blanks and low-scoring symbols than pots of gold, especially on the third or final reel. This creates the famous ‘near miss’ effect.

Modern slots have replaced the gears, cranks and stoppers with precision step motors and random number generators (RNG). When you pull the crank on a modern slot, a built-in RNG selects three numbers between one and 64. Each number corresponds to one of 22 spots on the three reels. The trick is that half of the numbers between one and 64 correspond to blank spots and only one random number matches the jackpot symbol. The odds of nailing the jackpot are 1/64 x 1/64 x 1/64 or one in 262,144.

The lever is just for show. Three internal step motors spin each reel and stop them precisely at the positions chosen by the RNG. Still feeling lucky?

Return vs payback

There is no such thing as a ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ slot machine. In modern casinos, slot machines are programmed to deliver a precise return percentage, somewhere around 95 per cent. That means 95 per cent of the money that goes into a slot machine is paid back out to the players and the casino keeps the rest.
But here’s where things get tricky. The return percentage is not the same as the payback, which is the actual amount of money you win or lose during each gambling session at a slot machine. If you sat down at a slot machine for eternity and pulled the lever an infinite amount of times, your payback percentage would be exactly 95 per cent. Likewise, in a casino full of gamblers, the collective machines will pay back roughly 95 per cent of the total money gambled during the course of a day.

Unfortunately, you are only one person and you don’t have infinite pulls. So your odds of winning are equally good or bad every pull. You could lose all day and that doesn’t mean the machine is rigged. And it doesn’t mean that the guy who wins the jackpot found the ‘loose’ machine. He just got very, very lucky.

Top 5 Facts: Gambling stats

1) Big jackpot, big odds

The odds of winning the jackpot on a ‘progressive’ slot machine like Megabucks is one in 50 million, although if you are that one you’re likely to become very rich.

2) ‘Easy’ money

68 per cent of people who gamble at Las Vegas play the slot machines most often. And there’s a large target market as nearly 90 per cent of visitors to Las Vegas gamble.

3) The house wins

In the United States, gaming was a $92 billion industry in 2007, double what it was a decade ago. And in the UK, there were 143 casinos as of 31 March 2009.

4) United States of Slots

Even though Nevada is widely considered the gambling state, there are 37 US states with some form of legalised electronic gaming device like slot machines or video poker.

5) Vegas’ most wanted

The Nevada Gaming Commission maintains a list of 35 people who are not allowed in any casino or gambling establishment. Only one of them is a woman.

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Many gambling enthusiasts in the United States are at least vaguely familiar with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, US law Pub.L. 100–497, 25 U.S.C. § 2701.

Passed in 1988, this federal law established how Indian (Native American) gaming would be managed and regulated. The act included definitions for 3 types or classes of gambling games. They are usually referred to as:

1. Class I games
2. Class II games
3. Class III games

Congress passed the law to help Native American tribes and nations improve their economic status after more than a century of oppression and exclusion in mainstream US society. Many Native American groups wanted to build land-based casinos, which would not only attract tourists but create jobs.

There was considerable resistance to this movement in many states, most of which did not allow gambling of any kind. To help resolve the conflicts and provide some clarity between treaties, state law, and federal law, the US government established a framework that eliminated some barriers to Native American investment in gambling industries. The law also provided some regulatory limits to respect state laws.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act introduced some confusion into the worldwide lexicon of gambling games because the distinctions are only observed within US jurisdictions. Other nations regulate gambling with different definitions.

But as the internet became a worldwide communications network in the 1990s and 2000s, most of the content published about gambling dealt with US law and casinos. Although non-US casinos have to observe their own laws and regulations, players who research gambling law on the internet must be careful to distinguish between USA gambling definitions and other gambling definitions.

Slot Machines How Do They Work At A

What Are the 3 Classes of Gambling Games?

Class I gambling includes all traditional Native American gambling games, most of which are only used for ceremonial purposes or in the contexts of cultural-specific celebrations and ceremonies. These games, which are only available at small stakes, are completely regulated by the Native American tribes and nations.

How Slot Machines Work Video

Class II gambling includes all variations of bingo games, player-vs-player card games like poker (where the house does not play a hand in the game), tip jars, pull-tab games, punch card games, and anything similar. Some people mistakenly include lottery games in this category, but the law clearly excludes state-run lotteries and similar games from Class II.

Class III gambling consists of everything that is not included under Class I gambling or Class II gambling. That means the lottery games you play are Class III gambling games. Slot games, roulette, dice games, and card games like blackjack where the house is also a player all fall under the Class III gambling games category.

So How Can There Be Class II Slot Machine Games?

If you’ve ever visited a Native American casino–like the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma, you’ve almost certainly played some Class II slot machine games. They look much like traditional slot machine games. They have 3 to 5reels with symbols on them, they pay jackpots, and they do everything else you expect of a slot game.

And yet, they are not slot machine games.

A clever company in Franklin, TN, known as Video Gaming Technologies, or VGT, developed electronic bingo games for Native American casinos that use the results of those bingo games to emulate slot game action.

In other words, the slot machine cabinets contain two screens, one that displays the results of the bingo game and one that displays the results of the simulated slot game. This dual visualization of the gambling game takes advantage of the fact that at the core of all gambling games is a simple principle:

You’re making a wager on an unknown outcome. What the Class II slot games do is take the result of the bingo game to determine what happens in the slot game.

What’s cool about this approach is that VGT was able to add bonus games to the bingo games that work like slot machine bonus games. They’ve developed a huge selection of bingo games that play like slot games. VGT is so successful they were acquired by Aristocrat Leisure Limited in 2014, although the former VGT still operates as an independent subsidiary company of Aristocrat.

How Do Class III Slot Machine Games Work?

The key to the hybridization of bingo and slot machine games is the Random Number Generator. Mathematicians have been developing algorithms to calculate unpredictable numbers for hundreds of years. For a detailed look at the concept, read “How Do Random Number Generators Work?” on Jackpots Online. Although the RNG does not produce a truly random number, in typical circumstances the number is random enough. Even so, slot game designers use random numbers in multiple ways.

Before I continue, I should mention that US law requires slot game designers to work by different rules from other countries’ slot games. In the United Kingdom, for example, the outcome of a slot game is determined by a single random number. In the United States, the outcome of the Class III slot game is determined by several random numbers.

To begin with, an electronic slot machine or online slot game uses a software concept called an array to represent each reel. Computer arrays work like rows of boxes, where each box holds one piece of information. The arrays for slot reels may have anywhere from 22 to 256 slots. Each slot in the array holds a symbol marker that tells the slot machine game what to display on the screen.

Slot game designers use special algorithms to decide how often each type of symbol should appear in each slot array. The frequency of the symbol’s use in the array and the size of the array determine how likely or unlikely it is for any single spin of the slot game reels to create one or more winning combinations. The game’s software may award prizes for one or more winning combinations at a time, depending on how many pay lines the game offers.

The random number generator produces a new number every few milliseconds. The number is placed in a temporary memory location called a register. The slot game software grabs the latest random number from the register and uses that to determine what happens next. For example, a 5 reel slot game needs 5 random numbers to pick how many slot positions will be spun on each reel before the reels stop in new locations. If the slot game awards random prizes like progressive jackpots, these are determined by additional random numbers.

How Class II Slot Machine Games Differ from Class III Slot Machine Games

What VGT did was create bingo game software that determines the actual prizes awarded to players.

But to make the bingo games look like slot games, they used the bingo game’s random results as if they are the random numbers that Class III slot games use.

To ensure that the slot game winning combinations match the bingo game prize values the VGT games work more like slot games in the United Kingdom. The game determines what prize was won and then creates a short video simulation of the slots landing on that winning combination.

Conclusion

How do class II slot machines work?

Either way, the slot games award prizes on a random basis. You could say that US gaming laws are paranoid in that Class III slot game software is required to closely emulate the physical spinning of slot reels. In fact, physical slot reel games have been displaying results of these virtual, in-memory array games for more than 20 years. So even when you see physical reels spinning, their stop positions have already been determined within microseconds of your pressing SPIN.

The Class II slot gaming experience is a fun gaming experience.

But the bingo game is displayed on a small screen, because VGT’s designers have found that players don’t enjoy looking at bingo patterns as much as they enjoy looking at 3 to 5 reels spinning and stopping on various symbols.

For the player, what matters is that they’re gambling for real money on an unpredictable outcome–and they can enjoy an entertaining evening with friends or loved ones.