How to Win at Slots – Online Slots Tips and Strategies for 2024

Slots are Fixed

The first myth we want to debunk quickly is that slots are somehow fixed by the casinos that offer them. This isn’t the case. All games at properly licensed casinos are tested and certified for fairness. In addition, all games are designed to make money for the casino over the long run anyway, so there’s no need for any venue to fix them.

Of course, some RTPs are higher than others, but this information is openly published so that you can see how much any game can be expected to pay back to players over the long term. You can then choose to play a game—or not—on the basis of that published RTP figure.

Slots Having Winning and Losing Streaks

Another common myth is that slots have winning and losing streaks. In other words, a slot can go through periods when it doesn’t award many or even any prizes, and then it can just as easily go through periods when it awards wins spin after spin. While these periods do occur, they aren’t evidence of streaks, and so there is no such thing as hot and cold slots.

Every spin, as we said earlier, is an independent event. And as with any independent event, it’s possible for the same outcome—such as a losing spin—to happen several or many times in a row. The more volatile a slot is, the lengthier such repetitions can be, but the next spin is always based on the output of the Random Number Generator and has nothing to do with past spins.

Betting More Increases Your Chances

This myth was born in the days when the only way to win a full slot jackpot in Las Vegas was to bet the maximum stake on any given spin of the reels. But your stake doesn’t alter your chances of getting a winning spin when playing slots online.

In some games, you can bet more to increase your chances of triggering a bonus round, and there are some buy bonus slots that allow you to actually pay a certain sum to guarantee a bonus trigger. However, as far as your chances of winning are concerned, as determined by the RNG, your stake is irrelevant. The only thing your stake determines is how much you’ll win if the spin is successful.

A Slot Can Be “Due” to Win

This is similar to the streaks myth, but here it’s believed that a slot has some kind of memory about past spins and can therefore be due to pay out after a losing period. Again, there is no truth to this myth. While slots are programmed in such a way that they can be expected to return a certain amount of cash to players for the long term, the RTP doesn’t have to hold true for the short term. Just because a game has given you 20 losing spins doesn’t mean that it can’t give you more of the same over the next 20 spins.

Only High Rollers Win Big Jackpots

Winning a jackpot on any slot machine is unlikely, but when it happens, it happens because the RNG has determined it should, irrespective of whoever is playing at the time. Consider the story of British soldier Jonathan Heywood, who set a Guinness World Record for landing a Mega Moolah progressive jackpot prize of £13,209,300 in October 2015. John won that sum from a bet of just 25p. There are plenty of other wins that tell the same story, so don’t believe for a second that only high-rollers can win big.

There’s a Best Time to Play Online Slots

This myth would have you believe that whether you’re likely to win or lose is dependent on the time of day or night at which you play. This is completely false. The RNG doesn’t care what time it is when you play, and your chances at breakfast time will be much the same as they are at lunchtime or at two in the morning. We don’t know where this myth came from, but it’s baseless.

Attitude Makes a Difference

The final myth that we want to debunk here is that your mental attitude can, in some mysterious way, influence whether you win or lose. While we’ll avoid making any comment about the kind of “mind over matter” ideas presented in The Secret and similar books, we’ll just say that millions of gamblers have disproven this concept the hard way by losing their bankrolls trying to do the opposite. Nobody places a bet expecting to lose, but losses still occur. If winning were as simple as thinking positively, the online gaming industry would have collapsed decades ago.

Greater Choice of Games

Because online games are nothing more than computer code, they don’t take up any physical space. That means an online casino can offer 2,000 different games just as easily as it can offer 200. In the real world, floor space at land-based casinos is limited, and so is the number of games that it can accommodate. For that reason, online players will always have a greater range of games to choose from.

Higher RTPs

Land-based casinos have much higher overheads than online venues, so they need to make more profit to cover them. That usually means that the RTPs of slots at land-based casinos are a lot less generous than those available online. Of course, the actual RTPs of land-based slots will differ between casinos, but overall, you’ll always find the higher RTP games online.

Demo Play Slots

One thing that online players have access to that land-based players don’t are demo play slots. Many online casinos let their players try out games without cost in a demo or “fun” mode to see how they like them. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any free slot machine games in an offline casino, but there are plenty to be played at online casinos.