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Slots Are Passive Entertainment

With the exception of skill-based games designed to pacify local authorities with a bee in their bonnets on the subject of gambling, most slot machines are really passive entertainment. Slot games cater to the couch potatoes of gamblers, folks who are amused by the lights and sounds of the casino or online slots website and want to exert themselves as little as possible. Back in the early days of slots, players would have to yank on a lever (the proverbial “arm” of the one-armed bandit) to trigger the reels; now, much slot machine play is as simple as hitting a button.

In this day of random number generators, the button-press doesn’t even have to be all that enthusiastic. The player’s activation of the slot machine game actually has almost nothing to do with the outcome, thanks to the origination of the RNG. This smart computer chip is constantly generating numbers, which correspond to outcomes of the machine. Once the button is pushed (or the lever pulled, in some retro-throwback devices), the machine literally does all the heavy lifting. The RNG selects an outcome and locks it in. This determines how much money, if any, a player will win on a given turn.

In fact, the display of the reels really is just for show. If the RNG has “decided” that you are not going to win a spin, the display of symbols that shows up is just for display, and to let the player know that they did not win. Likewise, the jackpot display is only secondary to the chip’s (rare) decision that the lucky player will “hit” in this turn.

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