We get questions periodically about whether changing your bet would change the outcome, or if the win was always destined to happen (as long as the button press timing would have been the same):
If you hit a winner on a casino slot of say $1000, if you had placed a higher bet would the same winning combination have hit?
Raymond S.
In a different era, we’d say it would be pretty likely that this would be the case, as long as you were changing your bet within the same denomination, and as long as changing your bet wasn’t activating or deactivating certain payouts. Today, it’s a more difficult answer.
In a time of simpler slot designs, changing your bet, at least within the same denomination, was just changing the multiplier of your per line bet, but the random number generator was working within the same range of outcomes across the board.
Changing denominations introduces a potential change in payback, because casinos have the ability to set payback for each denomination. Many casinos will take advantage of this feature, although not all do.
Changing denominations on slots can also introduce other changes, like the maximum number of lines, or the payouts of smaller bonus prizes and their frequency. As such, you could be working with a different range of outcomes, and that can change what would have come up at that moment.
Nowadays slots are more dynamic in their function. Different bet levels within a denomination can have different reel sets, and a single bet level can even be each spin working between multiple reel sets at random. All of these changes can mean that things aren’t as cut and dry about whether you would’ve had the same outcome on a different bet level.
What is true is that if you play the same denomination for a long time, enough to get a statistically significant number of spins (which will take awhile for most of us), you’ll approach the payback percentage the game is configured to offer for that denomination. Switching bets may switch short term results, but play enough spins on the machine and it’ll approach what the casino’s expecting to make off you as a percentage.
As such, we encourage players not to sweat too much if they got an amazing win, but are lamenting you got it at a lower bet. For a variety of reasons, that win may not have been available to you at that exact moment on a different bet, so it’s better to celebrate you got that win vs. worry about how much you could’ve won on a different bet.
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