For this Slot Machine Tells installment, we’re focusing not on a single game, but an entire category of games: Pot style games, including three pot variations.
On many pot style games, an object or objects will appear, and it will then fly up to the pot before indicating whether the pot closes/breaks open to trigger a bonus.
Here’s the thing. A lot of times that animation is window dressing for nothing actually to happen. And most games set that animation up after the conclusion of the spin.
This leads to the tell. On most (but not all) pot games, if you’re not getting the bonus, the words “Game Over” will appear on the screen while the pot animation is in progress.
Here’s some examples of this in action from Brian Christopher’s video library.
One of the earlier games to have a pot-style is Tree of Wealth, a sibling game in style to games like 88 Fortunes and Dancing Drums. Here you can clearly see the “Game Over” on the screen as well as “Game Pays 0” while the coins are flying the coins up to the pot. This means the tree is not going to shake and giving the progressive pick.
Here’s a more recent entry, Gold Fish Feeding Time, and again the fish food from the shakers is in motion while the game is already showing “Game Over” in the bottom right side of the screen.
Now, this isn’t a perfect tell – if you had a winning spin in terms of a line hit, the Game Over may not come up as quickly because it waits for the count-up to be complete before indicating it.
But since these games do have a pretty high ratio of losing spins, it can help speed that aspect up.
The placement of the animation after the spin is complete allows players to move on to the next spin faster. That’s the other part of a tell on this style of machine. If you can’t move on to the next spin, it often (but not always) means that you actually got the bonus – it can’t advance because the animation needs to complete so the pot can close/break open and the bonus can commence.
So between those two aspects, you will often be better informed about what happened before the animation has even had time to run its course. And, hopefully, be less amped up until you actually know the bonus is there.
That’s what I always look for, the game over at the bottom. 👍 I do tend to get a little impatient waiting for the symbol to fly up to the accumulator. lol
For all the steps they’re taking to make the slot machine a bit faster, that’s one example of something that slows things down a bit!