One of the things many players don’t often think about is that because slot machines are designed with a range of outcomes, that means there’s only so much that can be won at a time on a single wager or spin. So when Brian Christopher played a slot and noted that he won the maximum it could pay, that caught the ear of a few players:
There’s a MAX for winnings on a slot??? (Brian said so, was playing Wheel of the Gods)
Carolyn C.
There is, and it makes sense – slots are designed to make money for the casino, and the way they do that is having a finite set of possibilities, with the totality of those possibilities paying back a percentage less than 100% of the bets that would lead to those possibilities.
That means there’s an upper limit to what an individual spin can pay. That upper limit can be massive – Megabucks in Nevada starts at $10 million – but there’s also many slots that have much lower limits.
We love the example of Hundred or Nothing – a $1 wager can either pay you $100 or nothing. The slot cannot offer a payout larger than $100 because it’s not designed to – you’ll never get a handpay on that one, or it’s higher denomination sibling Thousand or Nothing.
One trend though for slots is more open ended bonuses – the ability to keep respinning, keep earning more spins, extending the bonus, etc. So there are other practical limits placed on the games like a cap on the number of free spins you can accrue, or a maximum win as a multiple of your wager (a notion that is quite familiar to online slots players).
When these caps exist, they’re outlined in the rules of the game, along with the pay table and other pertinent information, so if you’re ever curious you can find any hard limits there.
But even when it’s not a hard cap like spin counts, a full screen of a symbol or a top progressive can only pay so much, so it can be inferred in other situations what the cap of the machine could be in a perfect scenario.
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Good info! 👍
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