The thrill of trying to win a big jackpot is enough to make many people keep spending, even if they haven't won any of their money back. Although you won't win with every spin, there are some ways to increase your chances of winning and potentially minimize losses when playing slot machines.

Who doesn’t want to improve their chances of winning in the casino?

I know I do.

No one can teach you a method of making sure you’ll walk away from the casino a winner every time. That’s an unrealistic expectation that not even advantage gamblers have.

But you can reduce the amount you’ll lose and increase your chances of winning by making a few either/or choices. I’ve listed 7 of them below.

1 – Play European Roulette Instead of American Roulette

You measure a casino’s advantage over the player with a figure called “the house edge”. That’s a mathematically expected loss per bet expressed as a percentage.

If someone tells you that a game has a 5% house edge, that means you’re expected to lose an average of $5 every time you place a $100 bet. Of course, this is an average over thousands of hands, but as a mathematical concept, it’s a useful way of comparing casino games.

In American roulette, you face 38 different numbers on the roulette wheel. 18 of those numbers are black, 18 are red, and 2 of them are green—the 00 and the 0.

Those two green numbers are where the house gets its edge. A bet on red or black pays off at even odds, but the odds of winning aren’t even. You have 20 ways to lose and 18 ways to win.

Over time, that difference adds up to a 5.26% house edge.

A European style roulette wheel, though, only has 37 numbers. 18 are red, 18 are black, and 1 is green. The bets still have the same payouts, though.

This reduces the house edge for the game from 5.26% to 2.70%.

What does that do to your expected hourly loss?

Let’s say you’re betting $20 per spin, and you’re placing an average of 40 bets per hour. This means you’re putting an average of $800 into action per hour.

Your expected loss on an American roulette wheel is $42.08.

But on a European roulette wheel, your expected loss is only $21.60.

2 – Play Video Poker Instead of Slot Machines

When you’re talking about gambling machines, you talk less about house edge and more about payback percentage. The payback percentage is just the house edge subtracted from 100%. It’s the amount of money you mathematically expect to win back in the long run from a game.

For example, if we say that a slot machine has a payback percentage of 90%, that means you can expect to win back 90% of whatever you gamble in that machine over a long enough time.

But here’s the thing about slot machines:

They don’t list their payback percentages, and there’s no realistic way to guess. We do know that most slot machine games on the Las Vegas Strip pay back at around 92% or so.

But video poker machines, if you play them correctly and choose the games with the best pay tables, pay back much more than that. Even the worst games pay back at 95% or more.

And the best games pay back at 99% or higher.

Best of all, you can determine the payback percentage of a video poker machine based on its pay table. Any respectable video poker site (including our video poker section here), includes common pay tables with their expected payback percentage.

What’s the difference to your bankroll?

Assume you’re playing a slot machine with a 93% payback percentage. You’re making 600 spins per hour at $5 per spin. You’re putting $3000 per hour into action. The casino expects you to lose $210 per hour on that action.

If you’re playing a video poker game with a payback percentage of 99.54% for the same stakes, you’re looking at $3000 in action per hour still.

But your expected loss now is only $13.80.

3 – Master Blackjack Basic Strategy

Blackjack is one of the most popular games in the casino, but if you don’t master basic strategy, you’re probably facing a house edge of 4% or more. Master basic strategy, though, and you can reduce that to between 0.5% and 1% depending on the rules and the table conditions.

What’s basic strategy?

That’s just a fancy way of saying that every possible situation in blackjack has one mathematically best play. For example, you always split aces or 8s. That’s the mathematically best play, and if you make a different decision, the house edge goes up.

What’s the difference between a basic strategy player and someone who’s just winging it?

Let’s assume you’re playing 60 hands per hour for $20 per hand. That’s $1200 per hour in action.

If you’re making a lot of mistakes and ignoring basic strategy, your expected loss per hour is $48.

But if you’re using basic strategy and face a house edge of only 1%, your expected loss per hour is only $12.

Here’s a bonus blackjack tip, too:

Skip the tables where you only get a 6/5 payoff on a natural. That adds almost 2% to the house edge. Insist on playing 3/2 blackjack, or play something else entirely.

4 – Stick with the Simplest Bets at the Craps Table

The number of bets available at the craps table is staggering. The good news is that the bets with the best odds are the easiest bets—the ones at the edges of the table. The inside bets at the craps table come with a much higher edge.

The most basic craps bets are the pass and don’t pass bets. The pass bet is a bet that the shooter will win, and they don’t pass bet is a bet that the shooter will lose.

The shooter loses on the come out roll if she rolls a 2, 3, or 12. She wins on the come out roll if she rolls a 7 or an 11.

If she rolls any other number, a point is set, and she continues to roll the dice until she rolls the point again (winning) or rolls 7 (losing) whichever comes first.

The house edge for the pass bet is 1.41%.

The house edge for the don’t pass bet is 1.36%.

I should point out that even though they don’t pass bet is marginally better, you’ll probably have more fun betting on the pass line. Part of the fun of craps is rooting for the shooter.

I’ll use just one of the proposition bets in the middle of the table as an example of a bet to avoid. The “Any 7” bet pays off at 4 to 1, but the house edge is 16.9%.

Let’s say you’re playing for $10 per roll, and you’re playing at a table where you’re seeing 100 rolls per hour. That means you’re putting $1000 into action every hour.

If you’re betting the pass line, your expected hourly loss is $14.10.

If you’re betting “any seven”, your expected hourly loss is $169.00.

That’s a massive difference.

5 – Always Join the Slots Club

A lot of superstitious players think that if you play with the slots card inserted, your chances of winning go down.

That’s a myth.

This tip almost doesn’t belong here, though, because it makes it sound like you’re more likely to win with the slots club card inserted, but that’s not exactly the case.

What really happens is that the casino measures how much money you’re putting into action per hour so that they can rebate some of it—maybe 0.2%.

What effect does this have on your expected hourly loss?

Let’s look at a hypothetical Jacks or Better video poker player. The house edge is only 0.46%, so if you’re playing 600 hands per hour at $5 per hand, you can expect to lose 0.46% of $3000, or $13.80.

But if you’re getting rewards of 0.2% of your play, you’re getting back $6/hour. That reduces your effective hourly loss to $7.80 per hour.

If you play at a casino which offers double rewards during certain hours, you can eliminate the house edge of even play with a slight margin over the casino.

That’s worth doing.

6 – Take Plenty of Breaks and Play Slowly

This won’t necessarily improve your chances of winning, but it will reduce your expected hourly loss.

You should think of the house edge as a tax on the money that you’re gambling. Every time you place a bet, you pay this tax. That’s not what really happens in the short run, but if you play long enough, that’s exactly what happens.

Let’s look at two slot machine players as examples.

One of them is playing 600 hands per hour at $5 per hand. She’s putting $3000 into action per hour. If the house has an edge of 7%, that player’s expected hourly loss is $210.

The other is only playing 400 hands per hour at $5 per hand. She’s taking her time and taking lots of breaks, so she’s only putting $2000 into action per hour. With the same house edge, she’s only expected to lose $140 per hour.

The slower player might even be having more fun, because she’s probably paying more attention to what she’s doing. I call that mindfulness in action on the casino floor.

7 – Learn to Play the More Complicated Games

Here’s one truism about casino games everyone should know:

The easier the game is to play, the higher the house edge.

Games like Casino War, which require no strategy and are so easy a child could understand them, are best to skip.

Games like blackjack, where strategy plays a big role in how the outcome is determined, offer much better odds.

The house edge for Casino War is 2.33%. The house edge for blackjack is between 0.5% and 1%.

This means you can expect to lose 5 times as much money playing Casino War as you would expect to lose playing blackjack.

The opposite is true of slot machines, though. The more complicated a slot machine game is—more reels, more bonus features, etc.—the higher the house edge has to be to pay for those extra features.

Your best bet with a slot machine is to find one with 3 reels and a flat dollar amount for a jackpot.

Conclusion

Casino games are designed with an unassailable mathematical house edge, but that number varies by game and according to strategy. Your goal as a casino player is to get as much entertainment for your gambling dollar as you can.

The way to do this is to choose the games with the lowest house edge. Go back through the list on this page next time you’re at the casino. This will help you choose games where you will lose money more slowly and have a better chance of walking away a winner.

A slot machine is loose when it pays out a lot of money. It also needs to do this often to be considered loose. You’ll see some writers say that a loose slot machine is one with a high payback percentage, but that’s not enough to qualify as loose. It also needs to have low volatility.

What’s the difference?

The payback percentage is a function of how much the prizes pay compared to how often they hit. I could create a slot machine that pays off only one prize every million spins and that pays off 1.2 million coins when it does.

That machine would provide the player with an edge, a payback percentage of over 100%, but it still wouldn’t be a “loose” machine. In fact, it would be one of the tightest machines in the casino, because it only hits on average once every million spins.

That’s what volatility means when you’re playing slots. The more often a game hits a winning combination, the less volatile the game is. Most slot machine games have a hit ratio of around 30% or so now, which means that you’ll see some kind of win about 1/3 of the time.

The size of the wins is small enough that the game still makes a profit for the casino.

Your goal should be to find the loosest slot machines you can.

The Best You Can Do Is Estimate

The math behind slot machines and other gambling games is based on long-term results, not short-term results. You can make some guesses about the settings for a game based on short-term results, but they’re not necessarily accurate.

Here’s one way you could measure the hit ratio for a slot machine game, though:

You could track how many spins you make, and also track how many of those spins resulted in a win. That would provide you with the actual hit ratio for that session.

For example, if you made 300 spins on a slot machine over the course of half an hour, and you saw 100 winning spins, you had a hit ratio of 33.3%.

If you only saw 50 winning spins, your hit ratio would only be 16.67%.

The game with the 33.3% hit ratio is probably “looser” than the game with the 16.67% hit ratio.

The Concept of Naked Pulls

Years ago I read a book about strategy when playing slot machines by John Patrick. It’s a terrible book, and I don’t recommend it.

But he did offer one concept that I thought was interesting:

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The naked pulls concept.

A naked pull is one in which you get no winnings at all.

Patrick’s advice is to quit playing a slot machine once you’ve had a certain number of naked pulls in a row. I don’t remember if the number he suggested was 7 or 9, but it was something like that.

Here’s the thing, though:

A slot machine could have a hit ratio of 50% and still see 7 or 9 losing pulls in a row. It won’t happen often, but it will still happen several times a day just because of random variance.

Slot machines aren’t set on times or cycles. They have a random number generator which determines how often a winning symbol gets hit, but it doesn’t have a memory of what happened on previous spins.

Every spin of the reels on a slot machine is an independent event. This means that it isn’t affected by the previous spin.

Some of the time, if you walk away from a machine that has had several losing spins in a row, you’ll have avoided a tight machine.

Other times, you’ll just be walking away from a loose machine for no reason other than short-term variance.

What’s More Important? Hit Ratio or Payback Percentage?

Deciding which of these 2 factors is more important is more about your temperament as a gambler than anything else.

If you’re impatient and don’t want to lose a lot of money fast, you should look for a game that seems to have a high hit ratio. I’ve played slot machines in land-based casinos which hit 40% of the time while I was there. I didn’t walk away with a lot of winnings, because the sizes of the prizes were low.

But I didn’t lose a lot of money, either.

You could find a game with a hit ratio of only 20% that has a payback percentage that’s 5% higher than a similar machine with a 40% hit ratio.

You can’t really rank these 2 factors in importance, because they fall into a relatively narrow range.

Most slot machines have a hit ratio in the 20% to 35% range, and their payback percentages fall in the 75% to 95% range.

The payback percentage has the bigger range, but it’s impossible to calculate with any degree of statistical confidence.

How Would You Calculate a Payback Percentage for a Slot Machine Based on Your Actual Results?

The math behind calculating a payback percentage isn’t hard. You just calculate how much money you’ve wagered in a machine and how much you have left when you’re done. The amount you’ve lost is divided by the amount you’ve wagered to give you the actual payback percentage for that session.

I did this as an experiment not long ago. I played a slot machine for $1.25 per spin over the course of 400 spins. It’s easy to see how much I wagered in that scenario – it was $500.

When I finished playing, I had lost $100, which meant that I’d gotten $400 back in winnings from the game.

This means I lost 20% of what I wagered, which would be the game’s “hold.”

The payback percentage was 80%.

What does that say about how loose or tight the game is?

Not much.

When you’re calculating things like payback percentage and house edge, you’re calculating statistical events.

And if you’ve read much of what I’ve written about probability and gambling, you already know that in the short run, anything can happen.

If I’d finished that session with $600 and a net win of $100, I’d have seen a payback percentage of 120%, and I can promise you one thing:

That’s NOT the long-term expected payback percentage for that slot machine.

It can be a fun exercise to keep up with your actual payback percentage over time. If nothing else, it slows down the number of bets per hour you’re making, which will have the indirect effect of reducing your average hourly losses.

Some Tips for Finding Loose Slot Machines

The problem with offering tips for finding loose slot machines is that many of them are based on pure conjecture.

For years, everyone suggested that you play the slot machines closest to the walkways in the casino. The premise was that some slot machine technician had suggested the managers put the loosest machines there so they could attract more gamblers.

This is a myth that has since been dispelled.

Another piece of advice you’ll often see is that you should play flat-top slot machines instead of progressives. In this case, I lean toward believing this one. You could play a progressive slot machine where the jackpot is high enough that you could have an edge over the casino, but it would still be tighter than a game with a 1000-coin jackpot.

Here’s why:

In other words, if you’re not likely to hit the jackpot in your lifetime, it might as well not exist when calculating how loose or tight the game is.

You’ll also see people advise you to play for higher stakes. The idea is that the payback percentage goes up as the denominations go up.

This is likely true, too, but you still shouldn’t play for stakes you’re not comfortable with.

Conclusion

The best possible advice I could give you about finding a loose slot machine is this:

Give it up.

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It’s virtually impossible to accomplish this goal.

Also, almost any other game in the casino will cost you less money in the long run than the slot machines will.

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But if you are going to play, at least try to play the games with the flat top jackpots for the highest denomination you can easily afford.