If you play enough slots with mechanical reels, those that are the old school physical reel type, you’ll notice most of them have spaces between the symbols. These spaces, called blanks, play a critical role in balancing out the wins and losses on that style of game.
Blanks traditionally occur between each symbol on mechanical reels, but that’s not always the design. Some games, such as Huff N’ Extra Puff, use all of the reel spaces to place symbols. Others will sneak an extra symbol into what would normally be a blank space for various reasons. An example of this are the ReSpin games by IGT, where there’s a stack of multipliers that fill multiple consecutive spaces on the reels without any blanks.
But in most cases, the blanks space out the symbols, and allow for easier setup and management of near misses and other elements that are all too familiar to mechanical reels players.
We recently had a player comment on the presence of those blanks on reels:
When a machine is opened by staff and you see all those blank spaces on the reels, it’s a wonder anything ever lines up!
Judi D.
We’re sorry to say it actually is worse than what you saw in terms of the actual odds. You can’t just look at the reels and know what the chances of something happening are, because of the concept of a weighted reel.
With weighted reels, some spaces (usually the blanks) are designed to appear more often than others, and it creates a lot of the structure that ensures bigger prizes can be awarded by making certain combinations less likely than if each reel space had equal weight. So in some ways, it gives players a chance for bigger prizes, which many want, but it makes those prizes harder to reach – this is a great example of slot volatility.
So blanks have their purpose on the slot reels, and help with the overall design of many classic mechanical reel slots, and even more modern ones with more lines hitting the casino floors today.
