The only difference between a mechanical reel EGM (electronic gaming machine) and a video reel EGM is a matter of display. Mechanical EGMs use stepper motors (each pulse sent to it causes it to ‘step’ one notch – a 22 step motor takes 22 pulses to turn one revolution) to position the wheel. So, as described in lesson 2, when you press the button, a random number is generated which selects a row in a table. If the table shows that the first reel is to be in position 13 on the reel which will display a cherry and the reel is currently on position 8, five pulses will be sent to move it to position 13. Actually, either 22 or 44 pulses will be sent before those 5 so the reel will spin completely around once or twice first. For show. Video reel EGMs simulate all this with graphics.

Also described in lesson 2 was the concept of ‘virtual’ table rows which increase the number of combinations by adding duplicates which causing the odds of winning something to decrease. To make matters worse for the player, psychology is used in deciding which rows to duplicate. Since blanks are treated just the same as picture symbols, it can easily appear to a player that they just “missed” when they get two symbols and a blank where the blank is just past a winning symbol. That might be one combination that’s duplicated multiple times in the virtual list so that it comes up more often. And that’s one of the simpler mental games the games are playing on the player.

Then, is there a way to tell which game you should play? To a limited extent, yes.

Think about it this way. The casino wants to pay out as little money as possible, but it does have to pay out something or no one would play (and the regulators would be very unhappy, too). The way to do that is to design the paytable to pay out a number of small amounts, occasionally paying out larger ones, including the top jackpot on a game. Obviously, if you have two games which are otherwise identical, but the top jackpot (max coins, of course) is $5000, and the other’s is $500,000, the casino would much rather pay out a dozen $5000 jackpots than one $500,000 jackpot. It takes a lot more play to build up enough money to pay off that half mil, so that machine is going to be designed to pay off small amounts less often, too. In short, without going into the math, the $500,000 machine will have a lot of virtual slots in its table, while the other might not have any. Or put another way, the $5000 machine is much more likely to pay off smaller amounts more often than the $500,000 machine. It’s also likely to pay off the jackpot more often, too.

So, if you have the choice of playing two machines which are otherwise identical (ignoring the off chance the par settings which you can’t see of these two specific machines are wildly dissimilar which might throw this whole discussion out the window), pick the one which has the smaller top jackpot. Will that insure you win? Of course not, it’s just that the odds are more in your favor that you will win something, including the jackpot.

Progressive slots (machines whose top jackpot is pooled from multiple machines) which can have payoffs in the millions is a whole different animal, and yet, so much the same. Next time…