Some slots, particularly online, offer the option of letting it automatically spin on your behalf. A player wonders if there’s any benefit:
Some machines offer autoplay. Is it better to use the feature or continue using the play button? Any advantages?
Parris A.
Ultimately it’s more of a convenience feature. Instead of having to hit the button each time, it effectively hits it for you.
In the long term, completing the same number of spins on your own hitting the play button vs. autoplay should work out to roughly the same general result (of course, in the short term, variance will certainly make one work out better than the other, and it could be one or the other that does thanks to randomness).
Where players should be careful, like many other things nowadays on slots, is that if the autoplay will take spins faster than you normally would yourself, it’s accelerating how quickly you complete a spin and move on, and that will mean more money spent in the same amount of time than if you paced yourself more slowly.
And when every bet is exposed to the house edge of the game, more bets, and more overall total bets in dollars, will mean a larger expected loss.
What this effectively means is that although you may get the same number of spins, on average, doing one or the other, whichever is faster is more likely to reduce your entertainment time. And while that may be acceptable for some, others want to stretch it out.
So this is a personal preference more than a strategy, but we tend to encourage players to do what’s best for them, leaning in the direction of whatever lets their money last longer. If autoplay speeds things up, it may be worth manually hitting spin to stretch those dollars.
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