How to Play Slots

Slot machines are perhaps one of the easiest games to play, it is more a case of just watching and letting the machine do all the work. Although slot machines started, as machines with one big lever or arm on their side, they have developed into many different and various kinds but no matter how complicated or high tech they look, they are still the basic ‘one arm bandit’.

So with the original slot machine you would feed it a coin in the ‘slot’ and then pull the lever at the side to start the reels spinning. Today there is a multitude of ways to ‘feed’ the machine and you can often choose how much you want to bet on each spin of the reels. Most slot machines will have either 3 or 5 reels and depending on the size of the window on the machine, these can provide you with a number of different pay lines. These are the lines that you wish to bet on and obviously the more lines you choose, the more you will pay per spin - but the greater your chances of winning.

On today’s machines it is perhaps rare to see the almost iconic arm on the side of the machine and instead there will be a button, switch or tab that you have to press, turn or click on to start the reels spinning but once you have done that, your part in the ‘playing’ of the machine is over, the machine itself takes over and pretty much plays itself. In fact on some of the more modern machines there is an auto button and in those cases, the machine continues to spin on its own until it is stopped.

Winning on a slot machine means having the reels stop in certain positions that line up similar symbols along the various pay lines that you have chosen to play. You though, do not determine in any way where these reels will stop, that is the job of the Random Number Generator (RNG) built into the machine and which is set to paying out a certain percentage of the money that is paid into the machine.