Slot machines come in different denominations, like penny slots, 5-cent slots, dollar slots, etc. Dollar slots have bigger payouts, but more risk and you might hit your loss limit faster. Penny slots won’t bankrupt you, but you won’t win big, either. However, you can spend a lot of entertaining time playing. There are quite a few important factors part of choosing the best slot to play, gone are the days of simplistic three-reel mechanical slots featuring single paylines.

A lot of gambling writers mean well when they write about playing various games. Sometimes their advice is better than others. When people tell you how to play slot machines, though, they usually give you a lot of bad advice.

Slot machines are easily the biggest moneymaker for the casino. If you’re going to participate in such games, you should learn how to play slot machines right (not wrong).

The first thing to understand about slot machines is that they have a guaranteed mathematical advantage for the casino. Everything you need to know about slot machines stems from that mathematical fact.

Below, I’ve listed 7 pieces of advice you’ll see from multiple gambling writers about slot machines. I’ll explain the pros and cons of following each of those pieces of advice, too.

1. You Don’t Play Slots at All.

Smart Gamblers Stick with Games Which Cost Less Money.

Here’s the premise behind this nugget of advice:

Slot machines have a higher house edge than other casino games. You also place more bets per hour playing slots than almost any other game. As a result, statistically, you’re expected to lose more money playing slots than you would playing other games.

Here’s how the math behind this advice works:

You project how much you expect to lose while playing slots by multiplying your hourly action by the casino’s edge. (And your hourly action is the product of the size of your bets and the number of bets you make per hour.)

Here’s an example:

You’re an average slot machine player who makes 600 spins per hour. You play a dollar slot machine with a 3-coin max, so you’re betting $3 every time you spin the reels. That’s $1800 in hourly action.

You have no way of knowing the specific edge for a specific slot machine. But you can assume it’s something like 6%. It might even be higher if you’re playing at one of those awful airport slot machines or a slots game in a local bar.

Your projected loss per hour is 6% X $1800, or $108.

At first glance, it seems like this is great advice. Just don’t play slot machines at all.

What this advice doesn’t account for is that ALL casino games have a house edge. It doesn’t matter how high or low that edge is. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re putting into action per hour.

If you play a game with a house edge for long enough, you’ll eventually lose all your money.

That’s just how casino gambling works.

I love the movie Havana. It’s a loose remake of Casablanca, and Robert Redford stars in it. One of my favorite scenes is when Lena Olin’s character is playing roulette on a cruise ship.

Robert Redford, helping her out, moves her bet on a single number to a bet on red. (It might have been black; I don’t know for sure.)

She asks Redford, whose character is a professional poker player, if that will help her win. He replies, “No, you’ll still lose. It will just take longer.”

That’s the kind of logic that should be applied when playing casino games.

Maybe you’re intimidated by table games. Maybe you hate making decisions. Slot machines might be the perfect game for you.

Here’s the final nail in the coffin to this argument:

Those projections are long-term predictions based on the math behind the game. They don’t hold true in the short run anyway.

For most casino gamblers, the long term doesn’t happen on a single casino vacation. It happens over multiple casino vacations—possibly even a lifetime of gambling.

Most casino gamblers I know aren’t worried about how much their net win or net loss over their last dozen trips to the casino amounted to. They’re also not worried about how much their net win or loss over their next dozen trips to the casino will amount to.

They only care about this trip. In fact, they only care about the result of the next spin.

If you’re going to gamble in the casino, accepting that the house has an edge is the first step to managing your expectations. You should play the games that help you achieve your goals, whatever they might be.

2. You Always Play for the Lowest Stakes Possible.

This is another attempt to minimize the projected dollar loss per hour. If you’re playing for pennies, you’ll lose a lot less money than you would if you were playing for nickels or quarters. The math for this is straightforward enough, but let’s go through it just to make sure you’re educated on the subject:

My wife is playing slots at a penny machine. She’s only betting 50 cents per spin. (She’s betting 5 pennies per line on 10 different pay lines, so she’s putting 50 cents into action per spin. She could bet a single penny per spin, if she wanted to.)

Over the course of an hour, she makes 600 spins, putting $300 into action. If you assume a 6% house edge, she’s going to lose an average of $18 per hour.

On the other hand, I’m a little looser with my money. I’m betting $3 per hand, like in the example above. I’m losing $108 per hour.

Those are just mathematical expectations, though.

In the short run, it’s entirely possible that I’ll win a jackpot of 2000 bets. That’s a $6000 win.

My wife might win a jackpot of 2000 coins, too. But she’s only looking at a win of $1000.

Which one of us do you think had more money during that gambling session?

Here’s another way to look at it:

Gambling only has meaning based on how much risk and how much reward there is. If the amount of money that you’re risking is meaningless, you’ll be bored. And if the amount is so low that the potential win is also meaningless, you’ll be even more bored.

John Vorhaus wrote a great book about home poker games called Thursday Night Poker. In it, he explains how you should choose what stakes to play for. He points out that if you’re literally playing for pennies, the game will be meaningless.

He suggests that you set a buy-in that’s significant enough that you’d have an emotional reaction if it were in your wallet and you lost that amount of money. He suggests that it should be enough money that you’d swallow hard if you lost it.

He calls that your “gulp limit.”

I contend that this is true of slot machines and other forms of gambling, too. It’s easy to say that you’ll lose less money if you play for lower stakes.

Duh.

But you won’t care about what you’re doing, and where’s the fun in that?

Yes, gambling in a casino is a form of entertainment. And yes, in the long run, the house always wins.

But if you play for such low stakes that the game isn’t entertaining anymore, aren’t you just wasting your time?

It’s like my friend who sits around playing free slot machine games on the internet. He’s just playing for Monopoly money, and he’s hooked.

But I can’t imagine a less stimulating way to spend my time.

Put some money into action on the game, though, and my attitude changes immediately.

3. You Stick with the Slot Machine Games Which Have the Smallest Jackpots.

The reasoning behind this gem is that the slot machine games with the smallest jackpots have the highest payback percentage and the lowest house edge. (One is a function of the other, by the way.)

Of course, the games with the smallest jackpots are also the games with the fewest bells and whistles. In fact, they’re often the dullest games in the casino.

Did you really come to the casino to preserve your money and be bored by your gambling?

If so, then yeah, this might be the right way to play slot machines.

But I don’t think most slots players want to minimize their hourly losses. I think they want to take a shot at a jackpot that’s big enough that it matters. It doesn’t have to be a life-changing jackpot. Most slot machine players don’t have such a “lottery mindset,” although some do.

But if the jackpot is so small that you don’t care about it, what’s the point in playing in the first place?

Remember, the house edge doesn’t really matter much. If it’s over 0%, you’re going to lose all your money eventually anyway.

Why not take a shot at a big jackpot along the way?

The same logic applies to slot machine games with progressive jackpots. The machine takes a small percentage of each bet to “fuel” that ever-increasing jackpot. The logic is that you face better odds at a game that doesn’t do that.

But what if you enjoy thinking about

What Slot Machine Should I Play