Despite all their rules and features, online slots are one of the easiest casino games to play. Many modern slots have been simplified so much that you choose your bet per spin and play.
Take Dynamite Riches, for example. All you have to do is choose your bet and land 3 matching symbols on a winning line to get paid. Sounds easy! Be careful; your bet is, sometimes, complicated, and the difference can greatly affect the calculation of winnings.
How To Place a Bet
Before you hit the spin button, choose a few important settings.
- How many pay lines?
- How many tokens per line?
- How much are the tokens worth?
All of these parameters affect your total bet size and your stake per line. This figure is then used to calculate any potential winnings.
This is a classic scenario in the Wolf Gold slot. This is a slot with 20 fixed pay lines, but you have the option to change the total bet amount as well as the coins and their value.
Autoplay
It is worth dwelling on this useful feature, as it can save your fingers from endless tapping if you play slots often.
A single spin of a slot machine – assuming you don’t win or hit a feature – will take less than a second. Suppose you’re playing a highly volatile slot with a low hit rate. In that case, you may find yourself doing a lot of spins without action, which can be physically repetitive (although I’m not suggesting that playing slots is exercise!)
Most regular or serious slots players will use the autoplay feature to play hundreds of spins for them. Set the number of spins you want to play, sit back and enjoy the show. You can create rules that interrupt the autoplay, such as win or loss limits, as well as triggering bonuses.
How To Win
There we go. Virtually all slot machines use the same set of rules that determine how a win is awarded. They typically are as follows:
- Have 3 or more identical symbols
- On the same pay line
- From left to right
- Starting with the 1st roll
These first two points are easy. Get 3 or more of the same symbol on a payline. Some slots have 5, 3 or even just 1 payline, while others have 10, 20, 100 or over 100,000! Luckily, the game will do the hard work for you and highlight a winning line.
Here is a typical 20-line slot from Yggdrasil that shows the different possible winning line combinations. Note that the pay lines always start from the left reel. To win, you need to have the same symbol on at least reels 1, 2 and 3, with no gaps between them.
There are exceptions to these rules. Some slot machines pay both ways, so you can make winning combinations from right to left.
Some slots don’t use pay lines at all. In “cluster pay” games, such as Golden Ticket 2, you need 5 or more matching symbols in a cluster. So, the symbols must be connected vertically or horizontally. In MegaWays slots, winning combinations must always start from the first reel, but the symbols can be on any line.
There are other ways to win when playing slots. We’ll cover the basics in a moment and then go into detail in our video slots guide. The most common is to hit 3 scatter symbols to trigger a free spins bonus or another type of bonus. Ultimately, most of these features still rely on matching symbols on winning lines.
