On a post we recently shared about whether casinos set a machine to not jackpot, one well-intending player shared this on our Facebook page, and said something in a way that made us want to follow up on it:
The return to player [RTP] is in fact set by the casinos within parameters set forth by the gaming commissions in whatever area they operate in. So while the jackpot may seem like it’s “shut off” in reality it just has an RTP that may get reached long before the jackpot is due to payout.
Brandon D.
This leads to a common misconception we get about slots – that they hit their expected payout and then stop paying.
But that’s not how they work at all. Technically, slots never “hit” their expected return to player. But the more spins that are taken, with the way the game is structured, the closer it will approach that expected payout.
You see, a single spin could be any of the outcomes, from a losing spin to a $10k+ grand jackpot progressive. But the odds of it being the grand jackpot are very small, and a losing spin much higher. So when you complete 10 spins, 100 spins, 100,000 spins… the more likely the average occurrence is closer and closer to what it’s expected to be.
This is where statistics and probability and all that math stuff most of us tuned out in high school and college comes into play, but if you’re a slot maker and a mathematician, you’re probably in a pretty good position work-wise, because this all comes to the forefront.
The simple example we like to lean back on is say you have a slot machine with 1 million combinations. The slot costs $1 per spin, and the million combinations are designed in total to pay back 90 percent over time. If you paid $1 million to hit each of the million combinations once, you’ll make $900,000 – that’s how the house edge works.
But because there’s a random number generator that randomly generates numbers that lead to one of those one million combinations, it’s possible in one million spins some combinations are hit 4-5 times, and some not at all. But the more spins that occur, the more likely each outcome will be visited roughly as often as any other.
And that’s how a slot can approach, but never precisely hit, that expected return to player percentage. One more Grand jackpot than the expected average and perhaps it’s a bit above the average. A few less big payouts than expected and maybe it’s a bit below.
So a slot will never “hit” its RTP and then just stop paying – that violates how a slot needs to work under gaming regulations around the random number generator. Instead, it’s the slot makers’ and casinos’ trust in the math that will lead the slot to fall within a reasonable range of its expected payback over time.
