When you pull the lever on a slot machine, or push the button marked “play” on a video slot, you aren’t really initiating anything. The game has been going on continuously inside the machine, and all you’re doing is telling it to display what’s going on.
Here’s a typical five-reel video slot:
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The reels are spinning constantly, stopping only when you hit the “stop” button or when the game decides to stop them. (Some older machines had physical reels that spun and then stopped; newer ones use video displays.)
Inside the machine, there are dozens or even hundreds of virtual stops–places where the reel could stop. On each virtual stop, there is a symbol. On most machines, each reel has 20-24 virtual stops. (Some have more; some have less.
) So for our five-reel video slot, there are up to 24 x 24 x 24 = 11, 676 virtual stops. (Older three-reel slots had 10 symbols per reel and thus only 1, 000 possible combinations.).
The odds of hitting a particular symbol on the actual reel are 1 in 11, 676. But the odds of hitting that same symbol in the same position on each of the five reels are 1 in 466, 176–or about 232 times worse! That’s because each reel is really a separate mini-slot in itself, with its own odds of hitting the jackpot.
So how does the machine know where to stop each reel? The answer is that it doesn’t. Each reel is stopped by a random number generator (RNG), a computer chip inside the machine that spits out numbers all day long–thousands per second. When you hit “play,” what you’re really telling the machine is to take whatever number it was on at that precise moment and use that as a starting point for stopping the reels.
If that number happens to be 032, then reel one will stop on virtual stop 32; reel two will stop somewhere around virtual stop 132; and so forth. (This is why it’s important that you hit “play” at exactly the same time–to ensure that all five reels are using the same starting number.
Of course, if you’re playing at an online casino, then there are no physical reels at all–it’s all just computer graphics. But everything else works pretty much the same way.
When you hit “play,” an RNG inside the computer generates a random starting number for each reel (usually between 0 and 466, 176), and then counts up from there until it reaches whatever number it’s supposed to be at when you hit “stop.” Then it displays those symbols on your screen.
To sum up: Reel slots work by displaying a series of symbols that correspond to randomly generated numbers. The more symbols there are per reel, and the more reels there are, the more possible combinations there are–and thus the worse your odds of winning are.
