Are Slot Machines Really Random?

Some players can wonder if the slot games they are playing are really as random as the online casino states these games are. It is normal to have the question, "Are the slot machines really random?" This is especially when a casino player looks at the stats to determine how often the slot game will payout. These return to player percentages are a great way to determine a slot to play, but their existence does not stop the fact that slots machines really are as random as can be.

If you would think of a gumball machine. These are machines filled with round shaped gum. Someone can put in a quarter and turn the knob to have a gumball released into his hand. If the owner of the gumball machine were to fill the machine with 50 gumballs and make sure there is 40 pink gumballs, 5 green gumballs, 3 yellow gumballs and 2 red gumballs, the probability of receiving a pink gumball when you randomly insert your coin is 90%. However, the probability of receiving a red gumball is only 4%. Even though the gumball released is done so randomly, the likelihood of chewing on a pink gumball is pretty high.

Slots and Random Generators

Slot machines are similar. The manufacturer or software providers can state that these game will payout a certain percentage of the time, but instead the number of combinations or results of the combinations will be random. If a red gumball will give you $1000, and a pink gumball $0.10, then you would have a 90% chance of winning 10 cents, but a 4 percent chance of winning $1000. You can pay for specific symbol combinations, and a higher payout is given to you for symbols that pay a higher amount than others.

With the reels spinning, it can be determined how often a combination will happen that gives a payout. However, for certain combinations, you will not receive a payout. With a slot machine, a casino player can discover that they are able to receive a percentage such as 95% of the money they wager from the game because it is the known percentage of receiving at least of a kind of symbol in the game. The combinations of a single kind of symbol will be combined with the probability of the other symbols to determine how much you have won. Even though it is not possible to know which symbol will be on the reels, the probability of all the different combinations is not hard to discover. This is the reason why 5 of the same symbol will give the higher amount than when combined with other symbols. Casino games use random number generators to do so which is part of the technology responsible for making random combinations for slots players. So, it is easy to see that it is possible to know how much the slot machine will play, but also receive a random result.