Understanding Slot Machine Pay Tables

The icon is normally found in online slots either on the bottom or top of the reels, tucked away in the corner and is available on both mobile slots and slots for PC. Simply click this icon to access the game's unique pay table. The pay table will open up as a pop-up with everything you need to know about slot and its payout information. Nov 25, 2014 There are slot paylines where the symbols should appear for the best results, and potential winnings can be checked on the pay table. In all types of slot games, actual play consists of deciding how many lines to wager on, what coin denomination to use and how many coins one is going to bet, placing bets, and then spinning the reels by clicking on a tab. Random number generation determines the outcome of the spin, and if the symbols are line up appropriately on the slot paylines. Even on quarter machines, the amount of money involved runs up quickly. A dedicated slot player on a machine that plays off credits can easily get in 600 pulls an hour. At two quarters at a time, that means wagering $300 per hour - the same amount a $5 blackjack player risks at an average table speed of 60 hands per hour.

Understanding how video poker pay tables work is the first step in becoming a
smart gambler-at least if you like gambling machines. How much money you get as
a payout for each hand is the determining factor for the overall payback
percentages for the VP machines.

The goal of this page is to explain what a payback percentage on a gambling
machine is, how the payback table on a video poker game determines that
percentage, and what all of this means to your gambling bankroll.

What Is a Payback Percentage?

We've explained on other pages of our site what the house edge is and how it
works.

But we'll cover it again briefly here, because it relates strongly to a
gambling machine's payback percentage.

The house edge is a theoretical percentage of each bet that a gambler
mathematically expects to lose over the long term.

In roulette, the house edge is 5.26%. This means that if you place enough
bets (thousands+), you can expect to lose $5.26 for every $100 you wager.

In the short run, anything can happen. You might bet on a single number and
hit, winning 35 to 1 on your money. More likely, you'll miss, and you'll lose
100% of your bet.

But if you average out your losses over an extremely large number of spins,
you'll eventually start getting close to the theoretical average.

Gambling writers use house edge when talking about table games.

But when they talk about gambling machines, they talk about payback
percentage.

This is the expected percentage of each bet that you'll win back over a lot
of trials.

One of the reasons for this distinction is because table games pay off at X
to Y odds, while gambling machines pay at X for Y odds.

Here's what that means:

If you bet $100 on a single number at the roulette table and win, you get
paid $3500. That's 35 to 1. You keep your original bet and get the winnings on
top of it.

But if you buy $100 in credit on a slot machine or video poker machine and
wager that entire amount on a single spin or hand, you don't get your wager
back. It's included in the winnings.

You bet $100 on a hand of video poker and get a pair of jacks. That payoff on
that hand is 1 for 1, which means you win $100.

But you don't get your original $100 back.

It's gone.

In other words, the lowest paying hand in video poker is a break-even
proposition.

As a result, when you talk about gambling machines, you talk about payback
percentages.

If a slot machine has a 96% payback percentage, you can expect to win back 96
cents for every dollar you wager over time.

The Big Difference Between Slot Machines and Video Poker

Slot machines and video poker are remarkably similar. Both games deal with
combinations of symbols on a payline. Both games have payouts for specific
combinations.

The difference is that on a video poker game, we can calculate the
probability of getting a certain hand. That's because video poker bases its
random number generator on a deck of cards.

We know the possibilities available with a deck of cards:

• You have a 1 in 52
  chance of getting a specific card.
• You have a 1 in 13
  chance of getting a card of a specific rank.
• You have a 1 in 4
  chance of getting a card of a specific suit.

But on a slot machine game, you have no way of knowing the probability of
getting a specific symbol. It could be 1 in 10, 1 in 20, or 1 in 200.

If you know how much a result pays off, you can compare that with the
probability of getting that result to get an expected return for that
combination.

In jacks or better, you win 1 for 1 if you get a pair of jacks or higher.
You'll see that hand roughly 20% of the time, so the expected value for that
hand is about 20 cents on the dollar.

You can calculate that for every possible outcome, including outcomes where
you win nothing (50% of the time). Add those numbers together, and you have the
theoretical expected return (payback percentage) for that pay table.

On slot machines, you're missing that crucial piece of information-the
probability.

This is the big advantage video poker has over slot machines.

The secondary advantage is that video poker payouts are almost always better
than slot machine payouts.

Play free poker machines. An average video poker game has a payout percentage of 96% or higher.

Understanding Slot Machine Pay Tables Template

An average slot machine game has a payout percentage of 95% or lower.

You'll rarely find a video poker game with a payback percentage lower than
90%.

But it's easy to find slots with payback percentages in the 75% – 80% range.
Just visit a bar, a supermarket, or an airport in Las Vegas.

The Importance of Strategy and How It Relates to Video Poker Pay Tables

The other thing to keep in mind about video poker is that the expected return
for a game assumes you're playing each hand correctly. When you decide which
cards to discard and which ones to keep, you're making 1 of 32 decisions. And
only one of those decisions has the highest expected return.

Suppose you have a hand which includes a pair of jacks, but it also includes
4 cards to a royal flush.

The pair of jacks is a 100% winner of even money.

To fill the royal flush, you only have 1 card out of 47 which can fill your
hand. For simplicity's sake, we'll call that 2%.

But if you hit the royal flush, you'll win 800 for 1.

Would you rather have a 100% chance of winning $1, or a 2% chance of winning
$800?

The mathematically correct say to make that decision is to multiply the odds
of winning by the size of the jackpot. That's your expected return for that
decision.

In this case, 100% X $1 is an expected value of $1.

2% X $800 is an expected return of $16.

Since $16 is clearly more than $1, the choice if obvious.

The reason we call this example 'super-simplified' is because it doesn't
account for the possibility of getting other hands.

If you keep the pair, you also have the possibility of getting 3 of a kind, 4
of a kind, or a full house.

If you keep the royal flush, you also have the possibility of getting a high
pair again on the draw.

But the odds of those are so small that you can safely ignore them. Drawing
to the royal flush is correct in this case.

You'll find more about video poker strategy in our comprehensive guide.

Specific Pay Tables for Specific VP Games

We obviously can't list all the possible pay tables for every possible video
poker game on a single page. But we can provide some specific examples to
illustrate the concepts you need to be familiar with.

We'll start with a classic pay table for Jacks or Better video poker:

The columns list the payoffs for how many coins you've wagered if you get a
specific hand. All the payoffs save one are multiplied by the number of coins
you've wagered. That's an important distinction.

The royal flush is the top hand in almost all video poker variations. The
games are programmed to pay off at 800 for 1 for that hand, but only if you
wagered 5 coins on the hand. If you wager fewer than 5 coins, the payoff for
that hand is only 250 for 1.

This has a huge effect on your bottom line. In fact, it's the first rule of
video poker strategy:

Understanding Slot Machine Pay Tables For Sale

This isn't true for most slot machine games-although it is true for some.

But it's always true for video poker games.

You give up so much expected value for paying for fewer coins that you're
always better off playing for 5 coins at lower stakes than playing for 1, 2, 3,
or 4 coins at higher stakes.

The other thing to notice about the Jacks or Better pay table is the payoff
for the full house and the flush. You'll notice that the full house pays off at
9 for 1, and the flush pays off at 6 for 1.

On most Jacks or Better video games, the only variables on the pay table are
those 2 hands. In fact, this specific pay table is called a 9/6 Jacks or Better
pay table. An 8/5 Jacks or Better game has the same payouts on all the hands
except those two, which pay off at 8 for 1 and 5 for 1 respectively instead.

You can find other variations, but they're rare enough that most people don't
worry about that.

But here's the key number for a 9/6 Jacks or Better game:

99.54%

That's the payback percentage if you're playing with correct strategy on
every hand.

This means the house edge for this game is only 0.46%. That's better than
almost any other game in the casino. It's even better than the house edge for
blackjack, which hovers around 1% at most casinos.

The payback percentage for this game drops dramatically as the payoffs chance
for Jacks or Better:

• 8/5 Jacks or Better pays
  off at 97.3%.
• 7/5 Jacks or Better pays
  off at 96.15%.
• 6/5 Jacks or Better pays
  off at 95%.

How the Payback Percentage Affects Your Bottom Line

Casino managers and game designers like to forecast what kind of money a
specific game will make them over time.

As luck would have it, the math for this is easy enough that even someone
like me (and you) can understands it.

You simply multiply the average bet size by the number of bets per hour to
get the amount of action the game sees per hour.

You multiply that number by the house edge to get the amount the casino
expects to win (and you expect to lose) per hour.

An average Jacks or Better player probably gets in 600 hands per hour. (It's
a fast-paced game.)

Let's assume you're playing a dollar machine at max coin, so you're putting
$5 into action per hand.

This means you're putting $3000 per hour into action.

On a full-pay (9/6) game, you're expected to lose 0.46% X $3000, or $13.80.

That's not bad for an hour of entertainment at a casino.

Deduct the cost of a couple of free premium liquor drinks from the cocktail
waitress, and you're playing a close to even money game.

But how much can you expect to lose per hour on the 8/5 game?

The house edge for this pay table is 2.7%, which means you're expected to
lose $81 per hour.

That's a huge difference in your bottom line.

Play the 6/5 game, and you're expected to lose $150 per hour.

And that's still a better deal than most slot machines.

Conclusion

You can find pay tables for individual video poker games on the game guides
page on this site. We also offer specific strategy advice to help you get close
to the expected return for those games.

If something about our explanation of these concepts (pay tables, payback
percentages, and payouts) wasn't clear, please contact us and let us know so
that we can update this page accordingly.

Slots are among the most popular ways to gamble. It's easy to sit down, put your money in, and watch the reels spin. But there's more going on than you might expect. Let's take a look inside to understand what's happening when you pull the lever.

Slot machines generally have three or more 'reels,' each of which has a number of symbols. While physical slot machines may have 20 or more symbols per reel, digital technology allows them to have many more—some have 256 virtual symbols—with millions of possible combinations. The combinations of symbols that pay out if you bet on them are called 'paylines.'

Slot machines contain random number generators that can generate thousands of numbers per second, each of which is associated with a different combination of symbols. Whether you win or lose is determined by the random number generated in the exact instant you activate each play—if it matches a payline, you win. Since each spin is independent, random and unrelated to previous or future spins, it's impossible to predict what will happen on each play.

There are many different kinds of slot machines. Some allow you to choose how many paylines to bet on per play, and how much you want to bet. Before you put your money in, figure out the cost per play, the odds, the paylines, the return to player, and anything else that will help you make the right decisions for you. Look for pay tables on or near the machine that explain everything you need to know.

The possible payouts and the odds of winning depend on the machine you're playing, the paylines you choose to play, and how many credits you wager.

Machines that cost pennies to play might pay out small prizes relatively often. Others cost several dollars per play, but offer bigger jackpots and higher odds. For instance, for the I Heart Triple Diamond penny machine, the odds of winning a prize are 1 in 12, but the odds of winning the top prize are only 1 in 649,400.

No matter what machine you decide to play, the odds always favour the house. This means that over time, it's more likely than not that you will walk away with less money than when you started.

While machines can be programmed to pay out at higher or lower odds, a typical average house advantage for slot machines is 8%, meaning the average return the player is 92 percent. That makes slot machines less favourable than tables games such as fortune pai gow poker, blackjack and roulette, in terms of return to player.

Persistence doesn't pay off. Each play on a slot machine is independent, unpredictable and unrelated to what happened on the previous play. A machine is never 'due for a win' and they don't 'go cold' after a win either.

Future wins on a machine are completely unrelated to what happened when you were playing. Because random number generators determine the outcome of each play, the results of each play are totally independent from what happened before. Outcomes depend on what random number is generated in the exact instant a player presses play or pulls the lever.

Understanding Slot Machine Pay Tables

How often a machine is played has nothing to do with how likely it is to pay out on the next play. Payouts are determined by the pre-set odds of the machine and the unpredictable results of the random number generator inside.

Most slots are games of chance, based on the random number generator. For some machines, bonus games offer you a chance to influence the outcome by interacting with an arcade-style video game. While skill may be a factor, the random number generator usually determines whether you even get to play the bonus game and the amounts available to be won—so chance is still a major part of the deal.

Understand how skill and chance work and how they affect the games you play.

Take this quiz to get a better understanding of your gambling habits.

Understand the role randomness plays in games of skill and how it affects the outcome of the game.