When talking about online slots, Brian Christopher will often mention the higher payback percentages seen with online slots vs. their physical counterparts. A recent question asks for some clarification:
When you say an online casino’s payback percentage is 96 percent, does that mean over the life of the machine, because if I put $100 in it doesn’t guarantee I’m going to win $96 back.
Cameron
You’re thinking along the right lines, Cameron! It would be a pretty boring scenario if every time you bet $100, you got $96 back. And that would all but eliminate the ability to get a jackpot or some sort of big win if it had to hew to that type of requirement.
So it is definitely more over the longer term. Overall slot payback percentages are achieved over a long window of time, based on hundreds of thousands or millions of spins.
Slots don’t necessarily reach the exact to the decimal return to player (RTP) by design, because the random number generator (RNG) has some influence on it, but the more spins that are completed, the closer it will get, and the tighter the range of variance, around that expected long term number.
It’s complicated math, but it works out in the long term, given every outcome has an equal chance of coming up on the RNG, meaning that it’s expected that over time each outcome will occur roughly the same number of times, which is how the RTP is calculated.
So, even with a 96 percent expected payback, you could see a crazy run of winning, or a head-shaking round of losses. In both cases those streaks are not only possible, but probable, as a slot slowly makes its way to its overall intended payback percentage. Short term variance is part of the secret sauce of what can make a slot feel compelling.
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