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REEL – The reel is a crucial element of the slot machine’s makeup. Imagine long, ovoid wheels set within a terminal with pictures all over them, and you have a mental picture of a slot machine reel. When you activate a slot machine by either pushing a button or pulling a lever, the reels begin spinning. The most common slot games have either three or five reels, although there have been games with as few as two reels or as many as seven or nine! The reels spin and stop independently of each other, and the display of images is either a winning one or a losing one.

Modern video slot machines have no actual reels anymore, just a digital display of flickering images that mimics the action of reels spinning. This technology has made it so that game probabilities can go higher and higher, increasing jackpot size. After a certain point, the sheer size of the cabinet needed to house the massive reels makes higher-order (think, six digit) jackpots improbable.

RHYTHM PLAY – Proponents of rhythm play refuse to heed conventional wisdom that playing the slots is not a form of skill-based gambling. While there are fruities created with a skill element (thanks to nudge and hold functions, usually), your standard slot game is not one that you can manipulated through any careful timing and/or certain way of mashing the button or finessing the lever. “Rhythm play” is the name for the techniques of those believers that slot machines are likely to pay out much more generously with certain techniques. We have repeatedly heard the claims of rhythm play proponents, and are yet to find one that we don’t think is full of crap. If educated people who make a living studying casino games don’t believe in it, neither do we!

RNG – The Random Number Generator is what really determines whether or not you are going to walk out of the casino a winner… Lady Luck has very little to do with the matter, believe it or not! The RNG is a computer chip embedded securely inside of a slot machine terminal, which generates a massive number of mathematical outcomes – also known as slot machine spin results. It’s a microprocessor that generates untold hundreds of randomly generated numerical combinations a minute, no matter whether anyone is actually spinning the reels of the game in question.

When you take a spin on your favorite slot machine, in the instant that you push the button, pull the arm, or click your mouse, the RNG “captures” whatever combination of numbers was up, and turns it into the results of your spin. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of results there may be, there are just three possible outcomes: a loss (the vast majority of spins), a win, or a jackpot. There may be only a small handful of these last outcomes, based on the posted payout of the slot machine and how large the jackpot is. The images that actually show up on the reels are just an afterthought, a way of the device “telling” you the outcome. Every possible combination of symbols is assigned at least one number, and some are assigned more than one number. This is how it is possible to have probabilities of one jackpot in several hundred thousand spins of an online progressive slot game, with a limited number of combinations. The RNG made jackpots higher and took slot machine play to a level never dreamed of by Charles Fey.

Once you understand the some basic facts about the workings of the RNG, you will realize that many of gamblers’ myths and misconceptions about slot machines are really off-base. When a casino wishes to change the payoff percentage of any slot machine, they must have a member of the state gaming board present when the security tape holding the chip in place is broken and a new chip sealed into place.

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