There are theories abound when it comes to picking the best slot machine at the casino. The most common theories relate to brick-and-mortar casinos, but we’ll also talk about choosing slots at gambling sites. Let’s start with finding a slot at a traditional establishment.

As the title suggests, my fiance was playing on slotocash recently and got up to $5000 and was ready to cash out. The problem is, during her bonus period, she did not know all of the rules and she bet $12.50 on MAX five spins, until i realized it and told her she cant do that if her playthrough is not met.

Brick-and-Mortar Casinos

Slot enthusiasts have come up with all kinds of strategies for finding the loosest or highest paying slot machines. The goal is to find machines that either pay out frequently or that are due to award a big jackpot soon.

Some of these theories include:

• Playing slot machines near busier parts of the casino
• Playing slot machines located in out-of-the-way places
• Playing slot machines after someone else left without hitting a significant payout
• Playing slot machines at certain times of day

I have some bad news. None of these theories has ever proven to be effective. One of the big problems is that casinos are not obligated to post the payout rates of their machines. There’s no way for you to walk into the casino and find a machine that is “looser” than all the others. It’s all a guessing game.

One of the most endearing myths is that slot machines become due to hit after a while. This is why some people will stalk the slots bank and wait until someone gives up without hitting a significant jackpot. Their reasoning is that the longer a machine goes without awarding a jackpot, the more likely it is to give up a big jackpot in the future.

This theory is based on an old myth called “gambler’s fallacy.” Gambler’s fallacy is the belief that certain outcomes become more likely after a string of misses. For example, it’s a common myth that if the roulette ball lands on black 5 times in a row, it’s just bound to land on red any time now.

The problem is that every spin of the slot reel (or spin of the roulette wheel) is an independent, random event. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Slot machines, roulette balls and decks of cards do not have memories. They don’t keep track of what happened in the past. Every new game is completely, 100% random.

Something to keep in mind is that modern slot machines aren’t powered by mechanical pulleys, levers and weights. Today’s slot machines are powered by random number generators (RNGs). Basically, these are computer algorithms that generate random numbers which are in turn used to produce a random outcome every time the reels are spun.

This kills the other theories such as putting in your coins in a certain manner, pulling the lever just right or hitting the “stop” button at just the right moment. It also means that when you see a near miss, you weren’t actually close to hitting the jackpot. The RNG determines the outcome instantly. Those near misses and reels that come to a gentle stop are just added effects for the sake of drama.

The only real form of selection you can use when playing slots is to choose between high paying jackpot machines and lower-paying games. Big jackpot games give you fewer small wins but offer the potential of a life-changing jackpot. The variance in these games is high and you’ll go home broke more often than not.

Slots with smaller jackpots tend to hit more frequently. You don’t have the allure of massive jackpots, but your odds of walking away a winner at the end of the night are better. There’s not nearly as much variance when you play these games.

Online Slots

Most of what I explained above can also be applied to online slot machines. Just like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, online slots are powered by RNGs. There are no special tricks you can use to alter the odds of hitting a winning jackpot. Online slots are 100% luck.

Online slots also give you the option between high jackpot games that hit less frequently and smaller jackpot games that hit more often. Progressive jackpot slot machines are notoriously hard to hit but when you do get lucky, it’s worth a ton of money.

Lower payout games give you a better experience in the short run as you watch your bankroll jump up and down over the course of an evening. In the end, both types of slots are about equal in terms of long term expected value. It’s just a matter of personal preference.

The best you can do is just pick a slot that’s fun to play. Even though all slots work in the same basic manner, they come in all different types and styles. You have traditional reel slots, video slots complete with storylines and even 3D slots like those found at Bovada.

It’s best to forget about getting an advantage when playing slots. Out of all the games in the casino, none of them is as much about pure chance as slot machines. Have fun, cross your fingers and remember to keep an eye on your bankroll.

GDC 2019

SAN FRANCISCO—This year's Game Developers Conference saw two game makers emerge with a possible chapter in a future dystopian sci-fi novel: the story of making money by letting robots do the work. In their case, that work was the procedural generation of smartphone games.

A single 'game jam' event led to a data machine that ultimately pumped out a decent amount of cash: $50,000 over a couple of years. Years later, with that data (and money) in hand, the makers of this game-making machine, which focused entirely on 'garbage' free-to-play slot machines, used GDC as a wake-up call to an industry where the 'right' messages often revolve around listening to players, sidling up to publishers, and racking up critical acclaim. In their case, eschewing all of that worked a little too well for their comfort level.

Winning the “race to the bottom”

In 2013, two video game makers had been trying for years to make it in the burgeoning mobile games space. One of them, Alex Schwartz, had helped get the solid mobile swiping-action game Jack Lumber off the ground. (In a past life, I gave that game a good review at the now defunct tablet-only magazine The Daily.) The other, Ziba Scott, had put together a fine mobile-friendly puzzle game, Girls Like Robots.

Both games operated in a pay-once, play-forever model without microtransactions. Both attracted awards, recognition, good expo showings, and publishers. Both failed to take off.

They looked at the meager income they were making doing it the 'right' way, as had been established by the old publishing guard. They then looked at iOS and Google Play marketplaces and saw that 'freewares, clones, and junk' dominate the general selection, let alone the actual money-making charts.

In one casual chat about the sheer weight of that business reality, the duo came to a conclusion: 'We could do better... at doing worse!'

They teamed up during the 2013 Global Game Jam to push something out that resembled the 'race to the bottom' they saw on mobile platforms. Thanks to the time-restricted nature of a game jam, they opted to buy a 3D slot machine asset off of the Unity Store (a marketplace that lets game makers pay modelers and animators for unrestricted use of various 2D and 3D assets) for $15. They then spent the rest of the jam creating a system that would automatically generate the rest of the skinning needed to make this basic virtual slot machine just unique enough to be published as its own smartphone app.

'Let's customize these like other slot machine companies do,' Schwartz said. 'They make themed slots. What's the minimum set of things to change to make a different slot machine? Let's change the title. Change the one image on the reel that might be relevant to your topic. So, like, a dolphin slot: put a dolphin in there [as the jackpot slot logo] with a special icon. Then the background is a scrolling dolphin image.'

The original word list was hand-curated based on what the team thought was interesting but also generic and safe-for-work. The most scintillating name they went for at that point was '3D Sexy Librarian Slots.'

With the visuals knocked out, the duo went one step further: creating custom music.

'A crappy song would play, then use text-to-speech to sing the word 'dolphin' in the Google Translate monotone voice. It'd play that every time you won. It'd say the name of your game in the music,' Schwartz said.

As a result, with the press of a single button, a Unity script could put those steps together and essentially auto-generate hundreds of 'custom' slot machines. Schwartz and Scott confirmed that their automated system's scraping of public images exposed one issue: Google Image Search would throw up errors for exceeding the rate limit. 'We found a use for Bing,' Schwartz said in a phone interview with Ars. 'Its image search had a number of things that were looser. I'm not trying to knock them, but they have a reputation for being second class. That felt like a kindred spirit for what we were trying to achieve here.'

Slot Machine Button Panel

“A portal to a better world”

With that slot-creation template set, the team automated the process of feeding information to Google Play (a much easier marketplace to exploit than iOS at the time) and creating publicly available freeware slot machine apps with ads. One simple Selenium script later, and that process was done.

The duo could feed a single slot-machine keyword into their combined scripts, which took 'a few hours' in all to build, then watch on a 'ghost monitor' as its system faked like a human, clicked every appropriate checkbox, picked every country, agreed to every terms-of-service agreement, and filled in every appropriate text box—then took the auto-generated slot machine and uploaded it for anyone to play.

Accidentally Broke Slot Machine Buttons

They attached mobile ad network Playhaven to the whole thing because the duo's philosophy was that they never wanted to take actual money from users who would download their bizarrely named apps. They then 'walked away' for two months. After that period of dealing with real-life work, they peeked at their income and advertising statement and were stunned: people were downloading their apps, and 27 percent of those people were clicking on their ads, driving roughly $211 of ad revenue per day.

The team came up with a theory: 'All of our advertising keywords were related to casino related content,' Schwartz said to Ars. 'We had an epiphany: our game looks so fucking terrible, but people downloaded it for some reason. When they see an ad for a much better slot machine or casino, they click it because... of course you do! That's a greener pasture! A way better future you could be having! We think the quality was so low in our shit that the ads were a portal to a better world.'

Yet the duo incredulously admits that its average rating for many of the apps was in the four-star range and that reviews were quite kind. One review stood out to Scott, for the auto-generated '3D Bowling Slots' app: 'Someone wrote that they were disappointed that the slots didn't have much to do with bowling.'

Supervillain origin story?

The engineering half of their brains wanted to see how far this enterprise could take them. So they began tinkering with the existing template with things like the automation of slot-machine descriptions.

Google Trends seemed like a good idea, but that usually led to trademarked or public-figure names, and the team wasn't interested in getting out of the 'automation' loop by having to deal with a high volume of takedown requests. So they opted for a slightly updated app-name template: the word '3D,' plus an adjective, plus either an animal, location, or country, plus the word 'free.'

Examples included 3D Tremendous Face Pain Slots, 3D Rough Elbow Slots, 3D Mild Dogwood Slots, 3D Viceroy Butterfly Slots, and 3D Inexperienced Great Horned Owl Slots. (They eventually made T-shirts to commemorate the latter.)

Push Button Slot Machines

Schwartz and Scott also paid a small Romanian studio a pittance to build a higher fidelity slot machine, which they eventually discarded. That happened in part because the duo's mix of newer full-time work and ethical concerns crowded out their excitement and availability.

'Someone said, you could raise money on this idea, or sell this data to someone else, or sell your company,' Scott said to Ars. 'We were at a crossroads where the joke was similar to the origin story of a supervillain. Do we abandon all creative pursuits to make the most intense money-making slot-creating enterprise? Or does this continue being a tiny background of 1/20 of our day?'

Eventually, the headaches of keeping up with Google Play caught up to the team. Apps were removed for violating an updated terms of service that gave Google more leeway to cut out apparent crapware. Google also updated the Web interface on a somewhat regular basis. Moving a single box a few pixels could throw a wrench into the Selenium robo-clicking works, which the team had previously designed to auto-upload 15 apps a day (Google Play's upload limit for a single developer account at the time).

At one point, the app network Playhaven called the duo with a flat declaration. 'We're seeing erratic data on your account,' Schwartz said to paraphrase. 'We're not sure what's up. We're not interested in continuing to serve ads to your slot machines. But we want to be clear: you didn't break our ToS. You're just, I don't know, inconvenient.'

Playhaven then added, 'You have the worst users. People who come from your apps don't spend money.' The team switched to another ad provider immediately, Chartboost. 'They knew roughly what we were doing,' Schwartz said. 'They've been great.'

“Optimized to remove our content”

This many years later, all of the roughly 1,500 apps generated by this experiment are dead. And Schwartz and Scott think of the whole affair as a mix of a joke and a productive wake-up call.

'Our half-joking argument: by offering the largest target of low-quality garbage apps, these marketplaces became optimized to remove our content,' Schwartz said to Ars. 'You could almost say that our company trained their algorithm so that what we were doing could eventually not be possible. But we were the first to bring it to that level.'

In their GDC presentation, Schwartz mostly left the data up for people to peruse in a laughing manner, but also with a human angle about the costs that might arise if you chase such a robo-generated app dream with profit, not laughs, as the goal.

'This whole project was an itch that felt so good to scratch,' Schwartz said at GDC. 'We thumbed our noses at the mobile market that had broken our hearts in 2013. We laughed the whole way... The truth is I don’t give a fuck about slot machines. We’ve moved on. If there’s a business lesson in that, I’d say: scratch your crazy itches, give that insane idea a try. But even if it does work out... be prepared to walk away because it may only have been the attempt that made you happy, not the result.'