Slot Odds and the House Edge

If you’ve ever wondered how casinos stay in business, the simple answer is the house edge. The odds of every casino game are designed to give the casino an unbeatable advantage over players in the long run. This means that while a given player might be able to win during a session, as a whole, the casino can be virtually certain of making a profit against its players as a whole.

Slot machines, like other forms of gambling, also have a house edge. However, unlike table games or video poker machines, slots odds are rarely public, and different machines can offer drastically different returns to players. Finding slots with a lower house edge is probably the best way to improve your results at online casinos.

What is the House Edge?

The house edge is an expression of the advantage that the casino (or “house”) has in any gambling game. This is usually expressed as a percentage of the amount bet by a player on a single hand, spin, or roll of the dice. For instance, in baccarat, the banker bet has a house edge of about 1.06%. This means that every time you make a bet, you can expect to lose a little more than 1% of what you wagered: make a bet of $100, and the casino will theoretically profit (on average) $1.06 from that bet.

Of course, you can’t lose exactly $1.06 on your bet; that’s just the average you expect to lose in the long run. The more bets you make, the closer you can expect to get to the exact house edge, though there’s never a guarantee that the numbers will match the house edge exactly. But if you make a few million bets, you can be sure that your results will come extremely close to whatever the house edge is on a given game.

When it comes to slot machines or video poker games, players more commonly refer to a “return” rather than a house edge. This is just a different way of expressing the same information, focusing on how much players expect to receive from a machine rather than the advantage held by the casino. For instance, a machine might be said to have a 98% return; this means that you’ll expect to get $98 back on a $100 bet, and is the same as say the house has a 2% edge.

Typical Slot House Edges

While the rules of a given casino can always have an impact on the house edge, no type of game has more variety in the returns it offers players than slots. There is a huge range of returns offered by slot machines, with different casinos (and even different machines at the same casino) providing very different odds.

As a general rule, it’s usually true at live casinos that higher denomination slots offer better returns to players than cheaper slots. This is not necessarily true online, however, where players can often choose from several denominations on the same machine; on many machines, this option doesn’t affect the odds at all.

In live casinos, slot machines have been known to have returns as low as 85% or less, though many casinos tend to have their slots pay out in the 90-93% range. You may also find a limited number of special slots that are specifically advertised in the casino as “loose,” with guaranteed returns of 97-98%.

In the online casino world, there’s less overhead for casino operators, which translates into somewhat better odds. While most slot machine returns for online casinos aren’t public, it is generally believed that the majority of games hover around the 95% return level, which is much higher than almost all brick-and-mortar slot machines.

Can the House Edge Change?

Generally, the house edge or return on a slot machine stays the same throughout play. However, one very notable exception comes in games that offer a progressive jackpot. Since the odds of winning the progressive jackpot usually won’t change, the return to players actually increases as the progressive jackpot rises (obviously, increasing a prize without changing the odds for winning is always good for the player). This is what makes progressive jackpots so attractive for players; when the prizes get extremely large, the house edge can become very small or even evaporate entirely. It’s even possible for an extremely large jackpot to result in a player edge instead!

Slot Odds Misconceptions

There are a few wildly-held misconceptions when it comes to slot machines and the returns they offer. Perhaps the most prevalent of these beliefs is that a machine will tend to revert back to its programmed returns. This idea holds that if a machine has recently paid out a large jackpot, it will need to be stingy for some time after that to revert back to the guaranteed payout level; on the other hand, if a machine hasn’t been paying out, you can expect it to loosen up to get up to the guaranteed return.

As useful as this information would be for slots players, it simply isn’t true. Operators don’t have to use any trickery to achieve the payout levels machines are programmed for; instead, over the long run, the laws of probability will take care of that for them. Over the course of millions of spins, the occasional jackpot or cold streak has virtually no impact on the machine’s overall rate of return; the results on any good slot machine will remain random, meaning you have the same chance of hitting a jackpot the spin immediately after you just won it as you do if that machine that hasn’t given out a jackpot in several years.