Dispelling Common Slot Machine Myths

In this post I’ll dispel a few of the common myths that some slot machine players believe or have heard. Some of these may sound obvious to many of you, especially if you are a well seasoned casino goer & downright silly if you are a longtime advantage slot player/professional gambler. However, the vast majority of people who visit this website are not casino pros, rather they are casual players who may fall for some of these fallacies.

“Why is it that I can play for a long time & not hit a bonus but suddenly hit one as soon as I lower my bet.”

This is purely coincidental. Players tend to not remember the bonus rounds that they hit when playing their normal bet but will remember the ones they hit when things are going differently. In this situation, poorly. However, slot machines run on something called a random number generator(RNG) where billions of combinations are spit out every second. These combinations correlate to all possible outcomes ranging from a losing spin to the best possible payout on that particular slot machine. You hitting a bonus round has nothing to do with your bet but rather the exact microsecond that you hit the play button on the slot machine.

Does maxing out the sound really give me an “8.2 percent better chance of hitting a jackpot?”

Popular YouTube gambler “The Big Jackpot” typically states this at the start of a live stream or when he sits at a new slot machine as he turns the sound all the way up. This appears to be a running gag(at least I hope so) because volume has no effect on the return to the player. It’d be nice if it did but no.

Fast tapping

Fast tapping the play button does nothing to influence how a slot machine pays(see random number generator above). There are some slot machines which will even say so in their rules. Assuming you’re playing a non-advantage play machine, the only thing that fast tapping will do in most situations is lose your money quicker. Of course this doesn’t apply to advantage play situations especially when playing a machine like Hexbreaker 3 where a play can take a really long time to complete. In this case the person is trying to finish the play as soon as possible in order to move on to the next advantage play.

“I don’t play slot machines with a casino club card because the casino can track me & turn the machine cold if I start winning too much.”

Yes the casinos are tracking your play through the player’s card. However, the reason they do this is not nefarious. When you have the card in the machine & earning points while playing, the casino is gauging your value to the casino based on that play. They primarily use that information to give you offers based on that play to entice you to make future visits to that casino. If you were winning, so be it. But casinos are not going to go out of their way to change the return to player(RTP) while you are playing because you were winning. For one, it would cause a massive scandal if news of this broke out & severely hurt business. Secondly it’s generally a pain in the butt to change the RTP because of the many processes & regulations that surround them. Therefore, casinos don’t change them nearly as often as players think they do.