• Royal Reel Slot Machine
• Stopping Slot Machine Reels Retractable

New to the forum. Just got a Magic Pulsar Slot Machine and it has an issue where the reels wont stop spinning after you put the coins in and pull the lever. The 3 buttons on the front of the machine do not light up, but if you press them the red indicators on the board inside the machine light up so it looks like it's sending the signal. In the original three-reel Blood Life game, I identified a green 7 as the easiest symbol to pick out as it whizzed. I touched each reel individually as I saw a green 7 reach the top of the slot window, and managed to stop 7s on all three reels. Alas, I failed to land them all on the same payline. Where those reels stop are called, naturally, “stops”. Reels can stop on a symbol or on a blank space between those symbols. On early slot machine games, each symbol would have an equal chance of coming up, but now that computers are running the show, the odds can be convoluted. You can wait or you can stop. It will be same result managed by local machine logic or controlled by remote casino server (mostly in social games). Result usually generated by RnG (random number generator) or predefined tickets.

If you had put in one or three coins the outcome would likely have been entirely different. The machine is constantly drawing random numbers and the numbers that were drawn at the moment you spin the reels determine the outcome. So, if you had played fewer or more coins you would have spun the reels at a different moment and thus the outcome would have been different.

Thanks for the kind words Dave. You're right that it was the money that finally made me accept the banners. It is my understanding that when the player presses the button to spin the reels the random numbers are drawn at that instant, which determine where the reels stop, and ultimately what you win. The number of coins bet does not matter.

Thanks for the compliment. The outcome of the game is determined when the player initiates the spin. The game is constantly drawing random numbers, even when not played. The random numbers chosen at the moment the button is pressed to spin the reels determine where the reels stop, which determines what the player wins. So, if the player bet three coins he would have pressed the button at a different moment, causing a different outcome.

No, that information won’t help you at all. Your odds are always the same on every spin, regardless of the counters.

To answer your question I asked a well connected gaming consultant and he said Nevada regulations state that one stop on a reel can not be weighted more than six times more than either stop next to it. So if a jackpot symbol were weighted by 1 and both bordering blanks were weighted by 6 then there would be 12 near misses for every one time the reel stopped on the jackpot symbol. This would be the maximum allowed near miss effect. My own results detailed in my slot machine appendix 1 back up this theory well. The red double seven was the highest paying symbol and I saw the blanks above and below it about 5 to 6 times as often:

Double Strike Actual Results

The same source said that New Jersey and Mississippi likely have adopted the Nevada regulations.

My understanding is that the person who is pressing the buttons gets the money. I asked Brian, who helped with the last question, about this. Here is what he wrote, which I agree with.

In the scenario described, the person who put in the money and pressed the buttons would receive the jackpot.

What I find interesting about this question is the paradox that in all likelihood, the jackpot never would have occurred without this chance encounter.

As you know, the random number generator in the slot machine is continuously working even when the machine is not in play. So even though one patron feels cheated, their run-in ultimately led to pressing the spin button at that exact millisecond when the RNG was on the winning combination. So, if one patron had acquiesced, there is never a jackpot to fight over.

Thanks for helping in the fight against betting systems. First let me say that I have never worked for a major slot machine company and don’t have direct knowledge of this. However, I know many people in the industry and those I trust pretty much are in agreement on this topic.

That said, it is my understanding that in all forms of electronic games, including video slots, video poker, and video keno, the outcome is usually determined the moment you make your decision. Meanwhile the possible outcomes are constantly being shuffled, thousands of times a second. I can’t speak for every slot machine but I believe that with the major U.S. slot makers the outcome is not predestined but depends on the exact microsecond you press the button to make your play.

Thanks for the kind words. Scratch cards and pull tabs can indeed be printed in batches. These batches will have a specified number for each win, and the return of the overall batch will be exactly as the maker intended. In some jurisdictions, where only pull tabs are legal, the outcome can be displayed to the player on a video monitor, in the form of a slot or video poker machine. However, in Nevada, that is not how slots work. Each play is completely independent of the past. A machine programmed to average a 97% return, could indeed pay under 95% or over 99% over a year, especially if not heavily played.

By John Grochowski

Slot machines are the easiest games to play in casinos, but sometimes players are faced with reel dilemmas.

If you’re an eagle-eyed player who can spot winning combinations in a microsecond, will putting a quick stop to your reel spin improve your chance of winning?

And what about games with no reels at all, such as the skill-based games from GameCo? Should we really call them slot machines?

It seems the reels themselves sometimes prompt questions from players, and emails about both topics popped up recently.

Let’s take the second question first.

Royal Reel Slot Machine

To older players who make up a sizable portion of the slot-playing public, some of the new skill-based slots seem more like something you’d have on your PlayStation than casino games.

One example is GameCo’s Danger Arena, a first-person shooter in which you’re asked to gun down robots as you navigate the aisles and obstacles in a warehouse. Your payback depends on the numberof robots you shoot.

Most skill-based slots at this point leave the skill elements to bonus events, as in Konami’s Frogger or IGT’s Tulley’s Treasure hunt.

But GameCo and other companies breaking into the slot industry are eliminating reel play altogether and making the skill portion the main game.

Is that a slot machine? It is as long as players embrace the games and terminology. After all, the meaning of “slot machine” has evolved over nearly 140 years.

In the original sense, virtually no games are really slot machines anymore. They don’t have coin heads, so there is no slot to drop in coins to activate machines. A few older machines with coinheads remain in play at some locations, but mostly, we buy in with paper currency or tickets.

Stopping Slot Machine Reels Retractable

The term “slot machine” has been around since the 1880s. It originally referred to any coin-operated device. If you dropped coins into a machine and got a chocolate bar, you were buying yourcandy from a slot machine.

That changed in the 1900s, and slot machine came to mean specifically coin-operated gambling devices. The term has persisted through the elimination of coin slots, and it’s almost certain topersist through the changes on modern gambling devices.

And now, let’s go back and answer the first question.

As for the stopping the reels as soon as you see a winner on the screen, that not only does not help you win, it actually can hasten your losses.

A reader checked in early in the fall to say she’d just noticed that on many video slot machines, if you hit the spin button again while the reels are in motion, they will stop. The first timeshe tried it, she got a bonus event, and that encouraged her to try it again.

After that, her results were mixed, just as with any other method of play, but it left her wondering if a player who practiced, practiced and practiced could be come adept enough to stop thereels when winning combinations appeared.

Others have had similar thoughts, and a number of years ago I wrote about a player who accidentally double-hit the spin button and saw the reels stop quickly.

Unfortunately for players, stopping the reels early doesn't change your results on 99.99999 percent of slot machines. That’s just shy of 100 percent because International Game Technology usedsomething similar in the early skill-based game Blood Life. It was a three-reel game and the skill was in stopping the reels. Each would spin until you touched the glass in front of the reels,and skilled player could get better outcomes.

That’s not the case on games in casinos today. Stopping the reels early does not change results, but what it can do is lead to faster play with more spins hour. That can be a realbudget-breaker.

When you play video slots, the random number generator has already determined your outcome by the time the reels are spinning, and you’re going to get the same result regardless of whether youstop the reels early or let them halt in their own time.

Randomly generated numbers are mapped to potential results, and that map tells the reels where to stop. If the RNG has spit out a random number that tells the first reel to stop on a singlebar, then you’re going to get a single bar — regardless of whether you hit the button a second time for a quick stop or just let them take their own sweet time.

By bringing the reels to a quick stop, you're immediately in position to bet again. The amount of time it normally takes the reels to spin is cut out of the equation. If you keep stopping thereels, you spin many more times per hour.

What does that do to your bankroll?

Let's say you bet 40 cents per spin at 500 spins per hour on a penny slot that has a average 90 percent return to players. You can play more than 500 spins per hour without quick stops, but 500is a nice, steady pace that lets you watch your wins and stop to sip your drink.

At that pace, your average hourly risk is $200 with an average loss of $20.

What if you increase that pace to 1,000 spins per hour? Then total wagers increase to $400 and average loss to $40.

And what if you quick stop spin after spin, focusing intently on slot play and increasing your pace to 2,000 spins per hour? Your wrist would get tired, you might get a little headachy withsome eyestrain, but your bet total would rise to $800 with an average loss of $80.

In the wagering world, speed favors whoever has the mathematical edge. In blackjack, faster games are better for advantage players including card counters, but worse for less-skilled players.

On the slots, you can't change the house edge. Quick-stopping the reels doesn't help you, but it does help the house.

So really, there’s no reel dilemma. Unless you’re just in a hurry to win or lose and then move on, let the reels stop in their own sweet time.