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A lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A great article by Steve Bourie is titled, "Are Slot Machines Honest?" and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based good slot online machines have a whole lot of "variations" (being polite) than can deceive the player. Keep in mind, they may be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

Conversely, online casino slots use an electronic "random number generator" or RNG, operating inside a really large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of individuals that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There is no "sense switch" (see the Bourie article) that may be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG matches the final use, and will be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, although the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true benefit from software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines could also have payout percentages as low as 83%, which is not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as the other machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and you shall see which it rarely drops below 95% - that's, the house makes a 5% profit, on the standard. Actually, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% - 98% range. Therefore you may spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and also on the normal it's going to cost you $7.50. But players don't gamble to be average: the true reward is the high-paying win. And the well-paying win is balanced, keep in mind, by a range of players who lose and finance that win.

So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. That is a far cry from the specific situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called "one-armed bandits".

Players get better odds, they get absolute consistency across all games - but nobody can guarantee a win every time. That's just the nature of gambling, and that is involved in the thrill.

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