You can play a slot machine in Las Vegas before you’ve even reached baggage claim: there are tiny slots parlors in every terminal of McCarran International Airport. Once you pick up your rental car, you can stop for gas and play slots at a convenience store. And that’s all before you’ve even reached your hotel-casino, which — if it follows the modern standard — dedicates roughly 80 percent of its gaming floor to slots, and only 20 percent to table games.

This figure is even more startling when you consider that most slot machines have an RTP (return to player) over 90%. The average slot pays out at a rate of 93-94%. That gives an insight into how much money is pumped into the machines each day.

Bally Technologies, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of slot machines, is headquartered 3 miles south of the Strip. When I visited Bally in mid-March, Mike Trask, the company’s senior marketing manager, walked me into the company’s showroom to play some games. Compared to the cacophony of a casino floor, Bally’s showroom was practically monastic, the lights low and the room silent apart from the soothing hum of two dozen hibernating consoles.

Trask, a tall man in his 30s with dirty-blond hair, showed me the company’s new Friends-themed game, installed on Bally’s ProWave cabinet, a slick, 42-inch curved console. Friends celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, and the company hopes to tap some of that nostalgia. 'That person, that girl who watched every episode of Friends when it came out, is our demographic,' Trask said, standing alongside the cabinet.

I took a seat in front of the unit, and Trask touched a logo on the display’s upper corner, selected a box on the display that ensured I would get a bonus round, and told me to hit the spin button. I did, and a pared down version of the show’s theme song played, the NBC sextet smiled at me from the prime of their youth, and five reels of symbols — a Central Perk decal, a guitar, screenshots of characters — scrolled down the screen. The Wheel of Fortune-style bonus round featured a clip of Rachel saying, 'Happy birthday, Grandma!' wearing a wedding dress.

Bally assembles all of its machines in a factory warehouse next to its game studios and tucked behind its Vegas corporate headquarters. Last year, Scientific Games, Bally’s parent company, shipped out more than 17,000 new units. On my visit, hundreds of freshly assembled slot machine shells, featuring the industry standard black exterior and jutting dashboards, lined the warehouse walls.

A tag attached to each cabinet indicated its destination: Oklahoma, Washington, Michigan, Canada. Only a handful were destined for Vegas casinos, a sign of gaming’s national and international expansion. Scientific Games acquired Bally last year for $5 billion. At the time, 23 states had legalized gambling, a heavily taxable industry, to quickly infuse deficient coffers.

But the expansion of gaming generally is the expansion of slot machines specifically — the modern casino typically earns 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from slots, a stratospheric rise from the 1970s when slots comprised 50 percent or less. New York, the latest state to introduce gaming, doesn’t even allow table games, and Pennsylvania, now the third-largest gaming state in the country after Nevada and New Jersey, only later allowed table games in an amendment to its legislation. And increasingly, the psychological and technical systems originally built for slot machines — including reward schedules and tracking systems — have found admirers in Silicon Valley.

In the factory, Trask and I passed a ProWave cabinet, a design released by Bally in mid-2014 that features a 32-inch concave screen, like an even more curved Samsung TV. Trask claimed that putting the same exact games on curved screens increased gameplay 30-80 percent. I asked him why that was. 'It looks cool; it’s incredibly clear,' he said in a tone suggesting a guess as good as any. Game designers are charged with somehow summoning the ineffable allure of electronic spectacle — developing a system that is both simple and endlessly engaging, a machine to pull and trap players into a finely tuned cycle of risk and reward that keeps them glued to the seat for hours, their pockets slowly but inevitably emptying. As we stood over the gaming cabinet, Trask told me about the floor of the MGM, home to 2,500 machines and hundreds of different games. Trask’s mission, as he saw it, was simple: 'Our job is to get you to choose our game.'

The prototypical slot machine was invented in Brooklyn in the mid-1800s — it was a cash register-sized contraption and used actual playing cards. Inserting a nickel and pressing a lever randomized the cards in the small display window, and depending on the poker hand that appeared, a player could win items from the establishment that housed the machine. In 1898, Charles Fey developed the poker machine into the Liberty Bell machine, the first true slot with three reels and a coin payout. Each reel had 10 symbols, giving players a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting the 50-cent jackpot if three Liberty Bells lined up. The three-reel design was a hit in bars and became a casino standard, but for decades gaming houses considered them little more than a frivolity — distractions for the wives of table-game players. Accordingly, casinos were dense with table games, and slots were relegated to the periphery.

That began to change in the 1960s, when Bally introduced the electromechanical slot machine. The new rig let players insert multiple coins on a single bet, and machines could multiply jackpots as well as offer up smaller, but more frequent wins. Multi-line play was introduced: alongside the classic horizontal lineup, players could now win with diagonal and zig-zagged combinations. The new designs sped up gameplay and breathed life into the stagnating industry.

William 'Si' Redd, the bolo tie-wearing Mississippi native who oversaw some of Bally’s new projects during the era, was instrumental to that renaissance. 'The player came to win,' he said, 'he didn’t come to lose, [so] speed it up, give him more, be more liberal. Let him win more, but then [you make money] still with the speeding up, because it was extra liberal.' In other words, the new machines lowered slots’ volatility — gaming parlance for the frequency at which a player experiences big wins and losses.

The casino floor of the Boulder Club, early 1950s. Image courtesy of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

In the 1970s, Redd left Bally and founded another gaming manufacturer that was later renamed IGT. IGT specialized in video gambling machines, or video poker. Video poker machines could be designed to have even lower volatility, paying players back small amounts on more hands. And video poker’s interactive elements made them extra engrossing, turning them into an enormous success: people lined up to play the first machines, and the game’s ability to command a player’s complete concentration for hours gave it a reputation as the 'crack cocaine' of gambling.

'If you were to take $100 and play slots, you’d get about an hour of play, but video poker was designed to give you two hours of play for that same $100,' Redd said at the time, instructing game designers to lengthen the time it took a poker machine to consume a player’s money.

Redd also acquired the patent for the newly created Random Number Generator, which computerized the odds-calculator behind the spinning reels and allowed game makers to control volatility. A modern slot machine, at its core, is nothing more than an RNG going through millions or billions of numbers at all times. When a player hits a spin button, they are simply stopping the RNG at a particular moment. Everything beyond that — the music, the mini-games, the actual appearance of spinning reels, Rachel, Monica, and the rest of the gang keeping you company — is window dressing to keep you hitting spin.

IGT now makes 93 percent of the world’s video poker machines and is the largest manufacturer of video slots in the world. Its Wheel of Fortune franchise spans every kind of slot machine — reels, curved screens, and massive installations with enormous physical flourishes. On my visit to their Las Vegas offices, I asked Jacob Lanning, IGT’s vice president of product management, what makes a good game. 'If you can figure that out, you’ve got a job,' he said. Trask had told me something similar: 'If we knew what the perfect game was, we’d just keep making that game over and over.'

Perhaps no one has uncovered the Platonic ideal of the slot machine, but certain principles undergird most games. First, there’s a vague aesthetic uniformity: colors tend toward the primary or pastel, franchise tie-ins are a must, and the game soundtracks are typically in a major key. Meanwhile, the multi-line wins introduced by Bally have become an unintelligible tangle: modern slots offer players upwards of 50 and sometimes 100 different winning combinations — so many that without the corresponding lights, sounds, and celebration, most casual and even advanced players would have trouble recognizing whether they’d won or lost.

To keep players gambling, all slots rely on the same basic psychological principles discovered by B.F. Skinner in the 1960s. Skinner is famous for an experiment in which he put pigeons in a box that gave them a pellet of food when they pressed a lever. But when Skinner altered the box so that pellets came out on random presses — a system dubbed variable ratio enforcement — the pigeons pressed the lever more often. Thus was born the Skinner box, which Skinner himself likened to a slot machine.

The Skinner box works by blending tension and release — the absence of a pellet after the lever is pressed creates expectation that finds release via reward. Too little reward and the animal becomes frustrated and stops trying; too much and it won’t push the lever as often.

Like video poker, most multi-line slots rarely pay large jackpots, instead doling out smaller wins frequently. 'They’re imitating the formula of video poker, but they’re doing it in a slot formula,' Natasha Schüll, an associate professor at MIT who has researched slots for 15 years, says. In 2012, Princeton University Press published Addiction by Design: Machine Gaming in Las Vegas, the culmination of her research and a deconstruction of the slot machine.

Schüll says modern slot machines essentially continued the trend started by Redd so as not to jolt players too intensely in the form of losses — or wins. 'Too-big wins have been shown to stop play because it’s such an intense shift in the situation that you’ll kind of pause, you’ll stop, you’ll take your money and leave,' says Schüll. Stretching out gameplay with minor rewards, Schüll says, 'allows you to get in the flow of, another little win, another little win.'

As a result, modern slots pay out on approximately 45 percent of all spins, instead of the 3 percent of traditional slots. 'The sense of risk is completely dampened,' Schüll says. 'Designers call them drip feed games.'

That analysis is supported by a 2010 American Gaming Association white paper. 'Lower-volatility games often have greater appeal in 'locals markets' than in destination resort markets like Las Vegas or Atlantic City…Customers tend to play these games for longer periods of time…' In other words, lower volatility games paved the way for gaming’s wild expansion nationwide.

The advent of bonus games has also helped bolster slot machines’ popularity: instead of just winning money, certain combinations can trigger mini games. In the IGT showroom, Lanning showed me the company’s forthcoming Entourage game, in which a bonus game has the player match portraits of characters. In the industry, it’s called a pick-em bonus. 'Those are the most popular features,' Melissa Price, the senior vice president of gaming for Caesar’s Entertainment, told me. 'Customers enjoy ‘perceived skill’ experience.'

And then, there’s the emotional appeal: Price told me the company commissioned a study to find out why people love the Wheel of Fortune line so much. 'People said it was as much about the brand as anything,' she said. 'People said, ‘That brand — I used to hear it in the living room at my grandma’s house, I’d hear that wheel spinning because my grandma watched it. It reminds me of my grandma.’ I mean, how can you compete with that?'

Price and I spoke on the floor of Harrah’s Las Vegas at 9:00AM — the slots players were already at their machines, or perhaps they’d been there all night. Last year, Harrah’s parent company, Caesar’s Entertainment, declared bankruptcy as a consequence of overextension and growing competition. During proceedings, creditors appraised Caesar’s vast store of customer data as the company’s most valuable asset, worth about $1 billion.

Harrah’s pioneered the now industry standard Total Rewards player tracking system, first with a punchcard program introduced in 1985, then with a digital program and magnetic cards in the 1990s. Slots were easy to track, and stood at the very center of the program. The system grew even more sophisticated under the auspices of former CEO Gary Loveman. Loveman arrived at Harrah’s fresh from teaching at Harvard Business School, and he brought a methodical business savvy to an industry that, in many ways, had spent decades winging it.

Before the tracking system, the player management was as sophisticated as watching which players spent a lot of money and comping amenities to encourage them to spend more. 'We all looked around and said, there’s got to be a more automated way to do that,' said Price.

Price and I stood behind a woman playing IGT’s Ellen Degeneres game. Ellen’s head whizzed down the reels on the parabolic display in high definition. As long as the player had her Total Rewards card inserted in the machine, every time she hit the spin button the system recorded the size of her bet, what game it was spent on, at what time, how long she’d been playing for, and so on, until she hits the 'Cash Out' button on the machine, at which point all the data is encapsulated in her file, along with all the other games she has ever played at a Caesar’s casino.

Player tracking systems revealed more than a pit boss ever could: over time, Harrah’s can create a portrait of the person’s risk profile, including how much money a player typically loses before they stop playing and what kinds of gifts to give them to keep them on the gaming floor. Sometimes, that can be a penthouse suite; other times, it can be as little as giving a player $15 in cash. In 2012, This American Life charted the lurid and unsettling extreme of how these systems can be used in a story about a Harrah’s in Indiana that enticed a woman to keep playing with unlimited hotel suites, diamond jewelry, and free trips to the Kentucky Derby. The perks fueled her gaming habit until she was $125,000 in debt.

Every casino today has a form of the data system invented at Harrah’s — most of them are now built by Bally. 'We are the envy of probably every consumer products industry out there because of the amount of data that we really have on our players,' said Price. Newer systems can even visualize heat maps of casino activity — an operator can see precisely how much is being spent in a specific time period in localized areas.

The data also vindicates Redd’s approach: the small slots customer, over a lifetime of spending, is just as valuable as the high roller. 'The slot player was the forgotten customer,' Loveman told Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2010. 'I had to be willing to be unsexy in this,' Loveman added. 'I can take you to a casino that would have a lot of young beautiful people in there and you would say, ‘Man, this is a happening place.’ I could take you to another place where there are a lot of people who look like your parents. The latter would be a lot more profitable than the former. My job is to make the latter.'

After my trip to Vegas, I visited the Sugarhouse casino in Philadelphia, on the bank of the Delaware River. Sugarhouse opened in 2010 and is one of 12 casinos that turned Pennsylvania into a gaming powerhouse after legalization in 2004. The casino’s interior — clear passageways, a clean line of sight from the eastern to western walls — brimmed with activity on a Tuesday evening. Sugarhouse squealed with the cacophony of slots and the saccharine melodies sounded like a thousand robots blowing bubbles. (The slot manufacturer Silicon Gaming decided at one point that soundtracks in the key of C were the most agreeable.)

In 11 years of legalized gaming, the state has earned $3 billion from table games and $17 billion from slots. Table players at Sugarhouse made their wagers at an island amidst an ocean of slots. As I made my way through the casino, I struck up a conversation with two slot players: Diane Singleton, a 45-year-old retiree; and Jack, who refused have his last name published. The two were playing Fu Dao Le, whose theme can only be described as Cherubic Chinese Babies. The game was loaded onto a ProWave cabinet, and a red cursive Bally logo hung in the upper right corner of the screen.

I asked what they enjoyed about the game. Jack said that unlike other games, Fu Dao Le is 'highly interactive.' He likes the game’s 'kooky stuff; you can touch the display,' he said, touching the image of cherubic babies above the reels, causing them to laugh with a Pillsbury Doughboy-like giggle.

Jack and Singleton say they’ve both earned 'Black Cards' through Sugarhouse’s player tracking system, meaning they’ve each spent more than $10,000 here. Jack says the casino has comped them four cruises so far; Singleton says she threw her card away because it reminded her of how much money she’d spent. I had more questions, but at a certain point it became apparent that Singleton was no longer listening.

'She’s in the zone right now,' said Jack.

The 'zone' is at the core of Schüll’s theory about the success and proliferation of slot machines. She heard the term over and over again in her 15 years of research — the players repeatedly told her that they played to zone out, to escape thought.

To understand the zone, you first have to understand 'flow,' the concept developed by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe a hyperfocused state of absorption. During 'flow,' time speeds up (hours feel like minutes) or slows down (reactions can be made instantly) and the mind reaches a state of almost euphoric equilibrium. Schüll, in her book, describes Csikszentmihaly’s four criteria of flow: '[F]irst, each moment of the activity must have a little goal; second, the rules for attaining that goal must be clear; third, the activity must give immediate feedback; fourth, the tasks of the activity must be matched with challenge.' For most of their history, slots easily fulfilled the first two criteria; after lowering volatility, they fulfilled the third criterion, and with the introduction of multiple lines, endless bonus rounds, and the occasional mini-game, they finally fulfilled the four criteria.

The 'zone' is flow through a lens darkly: hyperfocused, neurotransmitters abuzz, but directed toward a numbness with no goal in particular. When Singleton emerged from the zone, I asked her again why she found the slots so compelling. 'I lost my husband two years ago to throat cancer,' she explained. 'He was the love of my life, and I started doing this just to — I was out of my mind and spent a lot of time at the cancer center.' Jack had lost his son to pancreatic cancer. As they told their stories, Jack and Singleton hit the spin buttons and the machines blared so loudly that their words were lost in the noise.

Singleton says she never recovered from the pain of her loss, and that’s why she keeps coming back to the slots. Jack echoed that sentiment: 'I don’t have to think. And I know I can’t win.'

'Right, so you know that,' said Singleton.

'Every now and then…you get something,' Jack agreed.

'But it’s never what you lost.'

'Because I don’t care whether I win 38 cents or 600 dollars.'

'You just want to see them again.'

Singleton rifled through her wallet filled with $100 bills. 'I’ll be right back, guys,' she said, and went off to get change.

Back at the Bally showroom, Trask and I had sat in front of the company’s new Duck Dynasty game. 'There’s never been more slot machines in the world than there are today,' he said. 'And that’s proliferation not just in the US, but abroad.' His hand rested on the game’s display, his index finger next to a reel symbol of a cast member sticking his tongue out and playing air guitar. Scientific Games’ market now includes 50 countries on six continents. This spring, the company announced it was planning on providing 5,000 of the 16,500 machines recently authorized in Greece.

The industry is also preparing for the eventual deterioration of its key middle-aged demographic and competition from free-to-play mobile games. 'People only have so much leisure time and there’s a lot of activity on iPhones,' Price told me. At one point in the Bally’s warehouse, Trask said, 'You know how you get people younger to gamble? Hand them a fucking telephone.'

The industry seems to be working on the same hunch. In 2011, Caesar’s acquired Playtika, an online casino games company that offers free and paid mobile games. A year later, IGT acquired the free casino games app DoubleDown, which runs as both a stand-alone mobile app and through Facebook. The company now offers online table games and a good sample of its portfolio of slots, including Wheel of Fortune, to mobile players. Earlier this year, the gaming giant appointed former Zynga studio manager Jim Veevart as DoubleDown’s vice president of games. And last year, Churchill Downs Incorporated, which runs seven casinos in addition to its Kentucky Derby racetrack, acquired the free games company Big Fish Games.

Meanwhile, the tech sector is adopting the principles of slot design for its own purposes. In the early aughts, the tech writer Julian Dibbell devised the concept of ludocapitalism, a term inspired by watching World of Warcraft players mine gold in the game to making a living in real life. Ludocapitalism was an attempt to explain the growing gamification of society through technology. Dibbell admits the concept’s parameters are vague, but at its most basic it identifies that capitalism can harness the human play drive for better or worse — and that increasingly, games aren’t allegories that say something about our lives; they are our lives. As people move toward more Schüll says. Writing in The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal tapped Schüll’s concept of the ludic loop to explain the inextricable entrancement of flipping through Facebook photos: you push a button over and over, primed for an eternally fleeting informational reward.

A more exact replica of a slot may be Tinder. The mechanics of the dating app mirror the experience of playing slots: the quick swiping results in an intermittent reward of connection, followed by the option to either message your potential date or 'Keep playing.' Tinder recently launched a premium version that allows the user to undo an accidental 'not interested' swipe, essentially monetizing mistakes made while in the automatic rhythm of the zone.

'I can’t tell you how often I’ve been approached since the publication of my book by Silicon Valley types who say things like, ‘Wow, the gambling industry really seems to have a handle on this attention retention problem that we’re all facing,' Schüll told me. 'Will you come tell our designers how to do a better job?’'

Last year, Schüll heard from Nir Eyal, a tech entrepreneur who founded and sold two startup companies that produce advertisements in free-to-play games. '[Eyal] showed me his copy of my book, and it had, like, hundreds of hot pink sticky notes coming out of it,' she told me. In his 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products, Eyal laid out his 'Hook Model' of product development that works on basic behaviorist principles: a trigger turns into an action turns into a variable reward turns into a further personal investment back into the product. Last year, he invited Schüll to speak at his Habit Summit, hosted at Stanford. Schüll gave a talk on the 'dark side of habits,' placing slot machines on the undesirable end of the habit spectrum.

Eyal told me he invited Schüll to offer a less self-congratulatory, 'rah-rah' voice to the conference. Although the conference focused on how to build habit-forming tech products, 'These techniques — they have a dark side,' he said. 'If not used appropriately, or if used for nefarious purposes, then they don’t always benefit the user.'

Still, it was difficult to determine whether Schüll’s slot research has been received as a warning or a how-to guide within tech. Eyal criticized slot machines for what he said was a business model dependent on addicted players — 'that industry, I have a problem with,' he said. But Hooked is in many ways tech’s version of Addiction by Design: his model of successful product design is a loop going from 'trigger' to 'action' to 'variable reward' to 'investment' and back again. In his trigger section, Eyal uses Instagram to illustrate how emotional pain can be a powerful motivator to use a product — in that app’s case, the mostly insubstantial pain of lost memories. He writes, 'As product designers it is our goal to solve these problems and eliminate pain…users who find a product that alleviates their pain will form strong, positive associations with the product over time.'

I asked Eyal what distinguishes mobile games or dating apps from slot machines. He gave a range of answers that sounded at once comprehensive and somewhat defensive — that tech addictions never really plummet to the league of gambling addiction; that people prone to addiction will be addicted no matter what — before finally admitting that, in a sense, everything functions like a slot machine.

'All content needs to be made interesting. What you’re doing as a writer is introducing variable rewards into your story. Everything that engages us, all pieces of content are engineered to be interesting,' he said. 'Movies aren’t real life, books aren’t real life, your article isn’t real life. It’s manufactured to pull us one sentence after another through mystery, through the unknown. It’s a slot machine. Your article is a slot machine. It has to be variable. So just because an experience introduces variability and mystery — that’s good!'

'I think the answer is, it’s okay to addict people as long as your business model doesn’t depend on it,' he said, as if finally finding the answer to a problem that had long seemed without a solution. 'That’s the answer,' he added. 'That’s the answer.'

Correction: a previous version of this article stated that modern slots have a 45 percent payback rate. In fact, they pay out on approximately 45 percent of all spins. In addition Nir Eyal's Hooked was published in 2014, not 2003.

Photography by Tiffany Brown Anderson

Edited by Michael Zelenko

Table Of Contents

In this article, I am going to show you how to win at slots.

First, we start with some practical tips on how to choose a winning slot machine. Then, once you have all the Slots tips you need, you can move on the real key to win at Slots:

Find loose slot machines to play online.

This article is going to change the way you play slots. And the chances are that is what you need — because winning at slots requires time, dedication, and the right mindset.

So, are you ready to learn how to win at slots?

Let's get to it.

If you play slots for fun, there are no rules to follow. You only need a Slot app like Slotomania and enjoy their instant play games.

If you want to win at online slots in freeplay or demo mode, download Slotomania, choose a slot machine game from their collection and play, play, play. You'll get enough progressive machine games and loose slots to enjoy your gambling experience for free.

Things change when your goal is to win real money at slots when you play online.

That's when this article becomes useful. Because here is where you learn how to pick a winning slot machine and increase your chances of winning money online!

Get a new no deposit bonus and play Slots online.

Register a free account and spin the reels to win!

1. Choose Winning Slots with the Highest Payouts

When you go online to play and win money at Slots, you need to know how to pick the right Slot machine games.

Most beginners start to play casino games thinking that all slots are more or less the same thing, only with different graphics.

That's a mistake.

If you want to know how to win at slots, you need a machine that pays out more than the other ones. And to know which one is an excellent Slot to play, you need to care about the Return to player (RTP) percentage.

The Return to Player (or RTP) is a percentage of all the wagered money that a slot pays back to its players.

It is not the amount of money you'll get back when you wager on real money Slots, and it doesn't indicate whether you have fewer chances to hit a bonus round or not — but it gives you a great indication on whether a machine pays enough for you to play on it or not.

How to Find the RTP of a Slot Machine

The quickest option is to search for it online.

Use Google, Bing, Yandex, or whichever search engine you prefer.

Many Casino news websites that publish content around casino games have entire sections dedicated to the RTP percentage of the Casino Slot games they review.

You find them on PokerNews, as well. Every review includes a section dedicated to the payout of each type of Slot with easy-to-understand info about the games with frequent payouts.

If this is your first time on our site, check some related articles like these list of games. By choosing slots with a high RTP, you'll improve your chances instantly.

Also, you check the slot itself. The RTP number is always mentioned somewhere. Usually, you find it in the settings of the slot game or the 'help' section.

So, how to pick a winning slot machine and how to use the RTP to know how much slot machines pay?

The RTP is calculated on a scale from 1 to 100. Most slots have an RTP between 92-97 per cent.

Slot Machines Tips

Always choose an online slot machine game with an RTP of 96 per cent or above. This is the best slots strategy to follow every time you play — since a high payback percentage indicates that you have a better chance to win. good option.

High RTP Slot to Play: Devil's Delight

Devil's Delight is a slot by NetEnt that's set in the underworld.

It features everything you'd associate with hell:

• Devils
• Soul reapers
• Graves
• The number 666
• Pitchforks
• Skeletons
• Flames

Is anything missing from the list?

The slot also features a separate Soul Reaper Bonus Game. There, you need to guess the sins of the characters on the screen. Every time you guess the right one — you receive points that help you win more cash.

This loose video slot has five reels and 20 paylines. And despite the sinful name, Devil's Delight is generous – RTP in this game reaches 97,6 per cent!

2. Determine the Volatility of Slots

Another critical factor to consider to pick a winning slot machine is the game's volatility.

Many games and gambling news sites refer to the games' volatility as their 'variance.' If you like, you can consider this as the risk level.

The volatility of a slot machine game measures the risk involved in playing a particular slot for the real money. One of my favourite tips for playing Slots is to consider it the 'risk factor' of the game you are about to play. That's because volatility determines how you win at slots.

• Low Volatility Slots: Your odds of winning at these slots are high, and it's easier to strike winning combinations when you spin the reels. However, you should know that low volatility Slots offer smaller wins — so your winning combinations might not be worth as much as you would like them to.
• High Volatility Slots: The odds of winning at these games are smaller, but the wins pay more. With the right bankroll, tips for playing Slots, and strategy, these games can be a lot more rewarding.

Both options are quite popular online since people play both types. Every useful casino guide gives you plenty of choices to find the right online slots game for you — with welcome bonus codes to try them for free before you invest your money in them.

Pick the Slot machine time that feels right for you. But keep this in mind:

To play high volatility slots, you need to be patient, have enough money to invest in a lengthy online gaming session, and have read enough casino blog posts to know all the secrets of slots optimal play.

Otherwise, low volatility slots may be a better option for you.

High volatility slots are a bit riskier, too. You never know how much time and money you need to invest in hitting a lucky spin and celebrating yet another day of winning money on slots.

How to Find the Volatility of a Slot Machine Game

Casino sites don't make the variance of the games as accessible as the RTP numbers — and that's in part because they don't want to help you improve your odds.

An easy way to choose games with the right variance is to use 'Google operators and let the world's largest search engine do the work for you.

Let's see an example:

You have seen some progressive slots with random jackpots, and the Mega Moolah game caught your eye. The most effective way to find the variance of this game is to:

1. Open www.google.com
2. Type 'Mega Moolah' variance in the search bar
3. Analyse the search results

Alternatively, you can explore the games and try to figure out their variance yourself. If you play the slot long enough, you should be able to see how often the game pays out and what kind of winnings you get.

If successes are rare but significant, you are onto a high volatility game. If you win often, but the wins are nerve-wracking and small, you just found a low-volatility game.

An excellent welcome bonus, a deposit bonus, and free spins are an excellent way to do this and discover the games' volatility by playing. These options help you learn more about the games and give you useful info that might help you understand how to win at slots in the long run.

High Volatility Slot to Play: King of Atlantis

King of Atlantis is a high volatility slot by IGT. The game plays on five reels and 40 paylines.

The symbols featured in this game include seashells, gold rings, gem-encrusted crowns, mermaids, dolphins, and the almighty god of the sea – Poseidon.

This high volatility slot machine doesn't have many bonus games or features (even if you bet the maximum). The only 'special feature' you get, is a round of eight free spins that activates when a trident symbol lands next to Poseidon.

Low Volatility Slot to Try: Hotline

Hotline is one of NetEnt's most popular Slots these days.

Beating the Slot requires you to travel back in time to the '80s, wear some clothes you'd not be proud of today, and use your ability to solve a police case. Somehow based on the cult TV series Miami Vice, beating the slot needs you to help two detectives to catch a jewellery thief.

The slot runs on a classic random number generator and features all the classic features NetEnt players love so much. Wilds, expanding wilds, re-spins, free spins - you name it. Also, there is a unique bonus bet where you can choose one, two, or all three reels. It increases your chances of getting Expanding Wilds.

As pay table of this slot suggests, Hotline is a low volatility game where wins are more frequent (but small in size). If this is what you are looking for, pick this slot machine, enjoy the game, and relax.

3. Don't Go with the Obvious Option

No matter how impressive an online casino is, you need to do some research before you start to spin reels on slots.

All casino sites (like all poker sites, let's face it) want your credit card and your money. They offer free spins or deposit bonus codes to get you on their platform and then have you play as much as possible. In other words, they want your money.

If you can afford to play real money on Slots, that's great, As long as the site you agree to play on and where you look for the next loose machine to try is a legitimate and regulated online casino.

Regulators like the United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC), the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA) work hard to eliminate dangerous companies from the online gambling industry. Their licensing systems are your best allies to be sure to play slot machine games on legitimate sites, use audited random number generators, and pay out winnings to the players.

An important factor to consider when you want to know how to pick a winning slot machine is to see if the site you wish to register on holds a license by the UKGC and/or the MGA. Regardless of the casino bonus they offer you or the insane fixed maximum amount of free spins they promise.

You should never play online poker or pick slot machines on unlicensed casino sites.

You find a full list of all the online casinos allowed in your country on this page.

A Loose Slot to Play: Himalayas: Roof of the World

How did I find this slot? I scrolled down to the bottom of the slots page at one of my favourite online casinos. And then, I just decided to pick a Slot machine I had never seen before.

Not all games make it to online casinos' front pages — especially those that have a combination of volatility and RTP that plays in favour of the players and that come from underdog developers. And Himalayas: Roof of the World comes from Barcrest, a provider that isn't often in the spotlight.

Also, Himalayas: Roof of the World offers good odds of winning on slots!. The game features an RTP of 97,75 per cent, which is above average. Combine that to medium volatility — and you know how to pick a winning slot machine.

4. Make Higher Bets

Every collection of slot machines tips or casino strategies tells you that you can't win a progressive jackpot with a minimum bet. And that's correct.

Top wins are always connected to the fixed maximum bets. You can forget your dream to become a multi-millionaire with just 0.01. In slots, like in video poker, the higher the bet — the more you can win. And, at the same time, the smaller the bet...the smaller the wins.

So, yes: your bet determines how to win at slots.

Slot machine payouts are proportional to what you wager in the game. If your slot machine strategy is to play small bets, don't change it. Just don't expect to score unreasonably huge wins.

As you understand now, betting more money helps to win more on line slots...but it also put your slot machine strategy in danger and makes you risk to lose all your bankroll much faster.

That's why higher denomination slots are also riskier than lower denomination slots. People play them in the same way and following the same slot tips...but the big wins happen only on the high denomination slots, which are also the game where you can risk to lose a lot of money.

Keep in mind this, especially if you love playing slots with progressive jackpots. Jackpot slots can be costly . Many games give you access to the top wins only when you bet the maximum — and that is why a correct slot strategy and bankroll strategy are essential to winning at Slots.

Risk is always an essential factor in gambling. And you decide how risky you want to play yourself. Never play more money than you can afford to lose and never underestimate the risks of gambling addiction — even then you play fun slot machine games.

One Expensive Slot to Play with Maximum Bets: Space Wars

Space Wars is another online slot by NetEnt. This online game is based on a popular slot you can play in all the casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

When you play Space Wars for real money, you can choose to bet anywhere from 0.4 (minimum bet) to 20 (maximum bet) per spin. The currency depends on your location.

This game does not feature a progressive jackpot, so you don't really need to bet max every time you spin. Start with smaller bets and go up. You'll see the difference in payouts.

Space Wars is a fast-paced video slot with five reels, four rows, and 40 paylines. The RTP is 96,8 per cent.

5. Trust Other Players

This is one of those Slot tips that you should not apply to many other casino games. While it may be valid for video poker, it's one you should not follow if you play online poker.

But when it comes to playing Slots...yes, you can trust your fellow Slot players and look how people play.

If a slot doesn't pay, the other players will call it out. Fast.

That's why you should use the information available on every casino blog and casino sites to your advantage. Browse through forums, spend some time on Reddit, and read what Las Vegas and Atlantic City players say about each game.

You can also join Facebook groups and ask for help there. In other words, take advantage of your internet connection before the casino takes advantage of you.

A Classic Slot People Play and Love: Gonzo's Quest

Released in 2010, Gonzo's Quest still didn't let go of its place as one of the top slot machines online. That's quite an achievement, I'd say.

This popular Slot game features five reels, 20 paylines, and an adventurer (Gonzalo 'Gonzo' Pizzarro) looking for the lost city of gold.

Players love this little guy and follow his adventures. Gonzo's Quest is one of the top-rated slot machines of all time by players, casinos, and casino critics alike.

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6. Avoid Branded Slots

Branded slots are fantastic to play. We can play with all our favourite heroes and spin the reels feeling part of the movies, TV series, and shows we love.

While these games are a lot of fun, branded slots are also the 'bait' a lot of online casinos use to attract us, the players.

Remember the point about 'not going for the obvious choice'? If you are a huge Game of Thrones fan, how likely is it that you would go straight for the Game of Thrones games when you see them on the list?

Very likely.

You don't need to be a psychologist, a consumed marketer, or casino operator to realise that. Fortunately, you don't need to be a hardcore gambler to know how to pick a winning slot machine either. That's what this article is for!

Developers with slots that feature popular brands paid a pretty penny to use the name. So, they won't let you go low with the bets. And those games will not be the easiest ones to beat either.

While the casino and the developer have invested a lot on the names you see on the screen, you are the one who can make it worth the investment. Or not.

Slot to Play Instead of the Branded Ones: Pamplona

What's so attractive about branded slots? Well-known name and faces. The stories behind the games and the characters we all know and love.

Can you have all that in a non-branded slot?

Take the Pamplona slot machine, for example.

This IGT slot is all about Spain, bulls, and matadors. A unique tradition turned into an exciting slot game.

In a way, it is a 'brand' because Pamplona's running of the bulls' festival is known worldwide. And it's more known than some actual brands, to be honest.

But to use this theme, developers didn't have to pay as they do for the brands. Thus, the payouts are way better.

The slot has five reels and 1024 paylines. Matador symbol acts as a Wild and Bull is a Scatter. Three scatters can trigger the El Toro Bonus where you can choose your option of Free Spins.

7. Take Advantage of Free Spins

How to win at slots with free spins when there are hundreds of hidden terms and conditions for withdrawals?

The wagering requirements can take the fun out of playing slots with free spins. No arguing there. But there are still free spins bonuses that can be worth your while.

The wager-free bonus offers.

On a limited number of online casinos you get wager free spins with no deposit on registration (yes, no deposit is required to play). And with no strings attached to them.

There is no cap on winnings, you can cash out anything you want, anytime you want, and there are no wagering requirements. How good is that?

Slot to Play with Free Spins: Pyramid Quest For Immortality

From Pamplona to Egypt. You can travel the world with slots...and the right free spins welcome bonus!

The Pyramid: Quest for Immortality slot features five reels, 720 paylines, and an RTP of 96.4%. This game takes you to ancient Egypt and brings you to explore the hidden and mystical world of Pharaohs, Gods...and pyramids, of course.

So, how to beat slot machines?

First and foremost, the best way to beat the Slots is not to continue asking the wrong questions and stop looking for simple hacks or Slots tips tho beat the casino.

If you want better odds to win on Slots, you need to:

1. Choose the slots that have high payouts
2. Choose the slots with the correct volatility level
3. Choose the slot with the highest Return to Player
4. Read reviews of the Slots on casino sites, forum, and Reddit
5. Sign up to get a bonus with low wagering requirements
6. Play on a licensed online casino site

While this might not be enough for you to beat slot machines and pick the winning Slot machine every time you play, it will help you win more often and - more importantly - enjoy playing Slots a lot more!

FAQ

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How do you pick a winning slot machine?

To pick a winning slot machine and get better odds to win when you spin the reels, you need to choose games that offer the right combination of betting limits, volatility, Return-to-Player, and wagering requirements (in case you play with a bonus).

What casino game has the best chance of winning?

In general, Blackjack is the casino game with the best odds. In terms of slots, the best choice is to pick a game that offers a return-to-player over 97% like the Slot Devil's Delight (RTP: 97.7%).

Are slot machines rigged?

The slot machines you find on regulated casino sites are not rigged as their Random Number Generator (RNG) is subject to frequent audits by state-owned gambling authorities. The same controls do not apply to unlicensed casinos — and that's why you should never play your games there.

_{This article was first published on July 14, 2018. Last update: January 10, 2020}

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