What Type Of Slot Machines Are There

For the better part of the last century, slot machines were simple enough. They consisted of a metal box that housed spinning, mechanical reels with symbols on each reel. If the symbols lined up and matched, then the player won a jackpot.

What Type Of Slot Machines Are There

Class 2 slot machines are generally found in smaller gambling locations. The players are all playing against each other and competing for the jackpot. The more people that lose money to the game, the higher the jackpot is. Class 3 slot machines are more common in large gambling cities such as Las Vegas. There are all sorts and types of slot machines for you to try out - classic slots, video slots, or progressive slot machines – but before you do, it’s important to learn how they work and the rest is up to your lucky stars. There are two types of slots jackpot, random and progressive. Random jackpots are usually fixed, and, as the name implies, pop up at random. Progressive jackpots pool players money and their ever-increasing amount depends on how many people play a particular slot. Types of Slot Games. Slot machine games are a cash cow for any casino, and they consistently outperform table games and other forms of gambling. In 2013, American players lost an estimated $119 billion through legal gambling, while Australian gamers led the pack in the biggest losses per person. MAXIMIZING SLOT PAYOUTS. Slot machines are not games of strategy. Live casinos and online casinos offer them as games of pure chance. Only rarely does skill come into play, although skill-based slots loom as a coming attraction.On most slot games, there’s nothing you can do to change the outcome.

Over the last three decades, computer and video game technology have caused big changes in how slot machines are played. Gamblers still see spinning reels, but the mechanism is now powered by a microcomputer called a random number generator.

What Kind Of Slot Machines Are There

Additional features have become commonplace, and dozens of different types of slot machines have become available. This page lists and categorizes the major types of slot machines available in casinos throughout the world.

Bonus Slots

One of the most common types of slots games now available are bonus slots, which offer bonus games when certain symbols or combinations of symbols appear on the payline. One of the most popular examples of this type of game is the ubiquitous Wheel of Fortune slot machine game, which features a replica of the wheel from the eponymous game show above the machine. When you hit certain symbols, you get to spin the wheel and get a bonus payout.

Banking Games

A banking game is a game in which coins are accumulated until they’re won. Piggy Bankin’ is one of the most popular examples of this kind of game, which has been around for a long time. Banking games should not be confused with progressive slots, which are covered later on this page.

Multiple Reels and Paylines

Early slot machines featured three reels and a single payline, but modern slot machines have a lot more possibilities. Why is this? Computers.

Three reel slot machines often now have multiple paylines, and five reel slot machines have an even greater number of paylines.

These changes have increased the potential size of the jackpots available on these games. It’s not hard to understand the math of why this is possible. If you have three reels with ten symbols on each, the hardest combination to hit has a 1 in 1000 chance of hitting. Any jackpot larger than 1000 to 1 would result in a loss for the casino.

Compare that with a five reel game with 256 different symbols on each reel. This kind of machine would be impossibly large if the reels were actual metal strips, but computers use imaginary reels, with results determined by a random number generator inside. With these kinds of odds, astronomical jackpot amounts can be offered, and the machine will remain profitable.

The number of paylines has increased dramatically, too. Early slot machines had a single payline, but now, common slot machine games offer the following numbers of paylines:

• 2
• 3
• 5
• 9
• 20
• 25

A new type of Australian slot machine game does away with paylines altogether, and these games offer 243 different ways to win. Basically, any combination of winning symbols from left to right results in payouts. These games are hugely popular, and even though the concept sounds a little confusing, it actually become intuitive very quickly during gameplay. In fact, 243 ways slots are wicked addictive fun.

Types of Progressive Slots – Standalone, Local, and Wide Area

Progressive slot machines offer constantly growing jackpots. These jackpots begin with a seed amount from the casino or network, and as each player plays, a tiny percentage of her bet is added to the progressive jackpot.

These jackpost can become astronomically high. The odds of actually winning such a jackpot are also astronomical. These types of games are comparable to the lottery.

Multiple versions of progressive slots are available. For example, a standalone progressive jackpot has a jackpot that’s tied to an individual machine. These types of progressive jackpots are generally in the $1000s of dollars range, and only play from that specific game count toward the progressive. In fact, standalone progressives are similar to banking slot machines.

Local progressive jackpots, on the other hand, feature linked jackpots within a single casino. These jackpots can grow larger faster because every bet on every machine in the network counts toward the growing jackpot. It’s not uncommon for these jackpots to reach into the $10,000s and even the $100,000s at larger casinos.

But the big jackpots are the wide area progressive games. These games link together slot machines from multiple casinos, and their jackpots are life-changing. These are the jackpots which get into the millions of dollars.

The most popular wide area progressive network in the world is called Megabucks, which was launched in 1986 by IGT, the largest and most successful slot machine manufacturer in the world.

Types of Online Slots

All of the above types of slot machines are available in online versions as well as traditional brick and mortar casinos. In fact, in jurisdictions where online gambling is legal but regulated, you can find exact duplicates of the games available at Vegas casinos.

Most of these games are made available via Wagerworks, which was purchased by IGT in 2005 for $90 million. Examples of these branded and popular slots games now available online include:

• Elvis
• Family Guy
• Jeopardy
• Judge Judy
• Lobstermania
• Star Trek
• Wheel of Fortune

Other online slot machine games are exclusively available online. Examples of these include games from Realtime Gaming and Microgaming, the latter of which offers some of the largest progressive jackpots on the Internet.

If you can imagine it, some casino software producer out there has probably already made a slot about it. From big budget movie tie-ins to retro video game revivals, and everything in between, there are thousands of slot machines out there each with their own distinctive qualities.

With all of that said, even a relatively quick glance at a slot machine can actually tell you a lot about how it will play.

3-reel games are generally either older titles or are trying to evoke a sense of nostalgia. With a limited number of paylines, and more in common with the fruit machines you'll find in British pubs than Las Vegas video slots, they're not as popular as more modern and flashier titles.

Five reels is, in the world of online slots, more or less par for the course. You may, however, find a title that throws in an extra row/reel or two from time to time. This immediately gives the game a bit of novelty value, as it's different from the norm, so it's easy to understand why developers love to create such games.

Sometimes worth millions, or even tens of millions of CAD, we know exactly why so many slots players stick exclusively with titles that offer progressive jackpots. However, like when you play the lottery, the odds of actually landing one of these huge cash prizes is very small.

Standard jackpots may be much smaller than the average big progressive win, and are usually in the region of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of coins, but they're also more dependable i.e. you know exactly what you're going to get if you win big.

In theory, it's possible to win a progressive jackpot just after it's been won. Even in this case you would probably win tens or hundreds of thousands of C$, but you might be disappointed if the player who won just before you took home millions.

The number of paylines a game has depends, to some extent on how many reels it has. The average game has between 25 and 50 paylines, but features like Reel Power mean that many games boast hundreds of different ways to win.

The more ways to win, the lower the value of most prizes you'll rack up will be. If the high number of paylines in a game means that you'll be winning every few spins then you can't realistically expect most of those wins to be more than, or even equal to, your initial bet.

We've already touched on this above, as the number of paylines a game offers has a significant impact on its variance. In layman's terms, variance refers to the risk of a game. High variance means that there's a high risk you'll burn through your bankroll very quickly without winning anything.

Low variance, on the other hand, means that you can expect to pick up lots of small wins while you play. So why would anyone choose a high variance game over a low variance one? Simple – the higher a game's variance, the higher its jackpot.

Because players win less regularly in a high variance title, casinos can afford to give away a larger prize when someone does hit the jackpot. It may not be immediately obvious whether a game has a high or low variance, but a look at its jackpot and number of paylines should give you a big clue.

A game with lots of paylines and a low jackpot is likely to have a very low variance, while a game with just a few paylines and a high jackpot has a high variance. Most games sit somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

Virtually all slots, with only a few exceptions, contain mini-games or bonus features. Even those that don't will probably have some form of re-spin feature or similar, which is in itself a type of bonus feature.

Most games have a bonus round comprised of a set number of free spins with a fixed multiplier and/or extra wilds, but others will give you a choice over whether you want more spins/wilds or a higher multiplier.

It's worth taking a look at the types of bonus features a game has before you start playing. If a game has, for example, four bonus rounds but you only like the look of one of them then it may be worth looking elsewhere for a title that's more your style.

With so many different titles to choose from, and so many different components that make up a game, actually choosing a game to play can be a bit overwhelming. The truth of the matter is that most slots players jump between a few slots in the early days of their playing 'career' while they figure out what they like.

An easy way to get a jump on this is to ask yourself the following question: 'what do I want to get out of playing the slots?' If you're feeling lucky and looking for a quick flutter with a massive potential jackpot, then you want to find a progressive title that has a high variance.

If, on the other hand, you're feeling very patient and want to pad your bankroll gradually over long playing sessions then you probably want a lower variance game with a smaller jackpot. Fortunately, with thousands of games on the web, you'll be able to find whatever you're looking for!