Trying to find out more about the odds of playing pokies and slots often results in a lot of confusion. Not only is the topic confusing in the first place, but there’s a lot of misinformation out there that can lead you off in the wrong direction if you aren’t careful.

In order to develop a solid understanding of the odds that are at play in every pokies and slots game (regardless of whether it is in a conventional casino or an online gambling website), you should start right at the beginning and work your way towards a practical understanding of the issue at hand.

Everything Begins at the Random Number Generator

No matter how you slice and dice it, anything to do with the odds for pokies has to begin at the random number generator – and this is true no matter what casino you’re in.

At the heart of every game of slots is a random number generator that essentially churns out sets of random numbers at an incredibly fast rate. Some believe that it does so every millisecond, or maybe even faster than that.

When you are in a casino or on an online gambling website and you push the ‘spin’ button of a pokies game, the game immediately ‘locks in’ the very last set of random numbers that were generated – and that is what is used to determine your results.

Two things in particular that you need to understand about the random number generator is firstly that it means that all results in pokies are entirely random, and secondly each spin has exactly the same odds as the one before it.

Exploring the Role of the Lookup Table in Pokies Odds

Needless to say, the numbers that are being churned up by the random number generator are just numbers – and in order to match them to a specific set of symbols the game of pokies or slots needs to rely on the lookup table.

In a nutshell, the lookup table takes those numbers and matches them with symbols according to a predetermined structure. However, this structure actually has a fairly huge role to play when it comes to the odds of that game of slots.

For example, let’s just say that a certain pokies game has a random number generator that churns out numbers from 0 to 9. In the look up table, numbers 0 to 5 are set to be cherries, numbers 6 to 8 are set to be blue bars, and number 9 is set to be the jackpot.

That means that for any reel, you have a 60% chance of it turning up as a cherry, a 30% chance of it being a blue bar and a 10% chance of it hitting the jackpot symbol.

Unfortunately, the lookup table is one piece of information that no casino or online gambling website will ever release – but it is important that you appreciate that this is the real key to determining the true odds of winning a spin in slots by landing a specific winning combination.

Coming to Grips with the Payout Percentage

So despite the fact that you know how the lookup table plays a huge role in determining the odds of a game of pokies – you can’t gain that information and so it is of little help to you. Fortunately there is one type of information that you can obtain, and that is the payout percentage.

In any game of slots, the payout percentage is the average expected outcome over the long term with regards to the amount of cash played that is returned to the players. That means that a payout percentage of 90% will imply that over the long term 90% of the total cash used to play that particular game of pokies in that casino will be given back to the players.

To cut through the technicalities of how the payout percentage is calculated, it should be clear enough that it is the based on the cumulative probabilities of landing winning combinations, and so it is going to be your greatest insight into the odds of any particular game of slots or pokies, whether in a conventional casino or on an online gambling website.

Are the Odds in Pokies Alterable?

Much earlier on you were told that the odds in pokies are the same for every spin within the same game – this is a hard and fast fact. Frankly speaking, there is no action that you can take to alter these odds while you play the game, which is why it is all the more important that you choose a game with good odds in the first place.

For slots, once you’ve chosen a game then you’re saddled with those odds and they don’t change. From time to time you might hear rumors about ‘hot’ games or ‘cold’ games, or even hear that games that haven’t paid out for a long time are ‘due’ to pay out.

All of this is really just a collection of myths that have risen over time regarding pokies and they have no basis. Don’t be tempted to choose games of slots in a casino due to any of these myths or you’ll quickly find yourself at a disadvantage.

Since you now have a clear picture and complete understanding of the odds when it comes to pokies, you should have no trouble wading through the myths though!