Slot machines are undoubtedly the most cherished game of chance found both in online and land-based casinos. These fun-filled new casino games can make you win some life-changing amounts or can also lead you to bankruptcy within a blink of the eye. Their eye-catching color combination, intriguing themes, soothing sound, and animation effects coupled with easy gameplay attract thousands of players from all around the world.
The same goes for online reel layouts and functionalities. These machines come packed with several different configurations, including the classic three-reel grid, standard 5×4 grid layout, Megaways, Megawin, colossal reels, single lines, multi-lines, and so many more. These layouts enable slot developers to put out different verities of slot machines, but the question is if these layouts can affect your winnings? Well, the simple answer is yes, they can. How? Let’s find out.
How Slot’s Layout Can Affect Your Winnings?
As stated, the slot comes in different layouts from a single line 3 reel slots to multi-line slots with up to thousands of ways to form your winning combinations. As the reels increase, so do the pay lines, and as the pay lines grow, so do the ways you can land your winning combination, and hence your chances of landing a winning combination increase.
For instance, if you’re playing a five reel slot with only a single pay line enabled, you’ll have only a single way to form your combination, and you can’t win unless matching symbols rack up on that single line.
In comparison, if you are spinning five reels with 50 enabled pay lines, then you’ll have a chance of lining up your winning combinations in 50 different ways, and therefore, you’ll have a better chance of winning.
However, there are a couple of other factors apart from the reel layouts that can also affect your winnings. These include the RTP and volatility of a slot machine.
What is Slot RTP?
If you like to put your hard-earned money on slot machines and still don’t have any idea of what the RTP of a slot machine is, you may have been choosing slots that do not precisely meet your winning expectations. The theme and layout are very important in a slot machine, but it is just as important to know what the RTP of a slot is to obtain the highest possible winnings.
The RTP is the acronym for the English term “Return to Player.” This concept indicates the percentage of money that that specific slot will return to the players during its whole lifetime. In other words, each online slot has a unique and exclusive RTP that is usually above 90%, and that’s the percentage of your total bets made on a specific slot machine that will probably be returned to you.
Let’s take an example with a slot machine that indicates an RTP of 95%; what this means is that for every 100 Pounds that are wagered on that slot machine, 95 Pounds will be returned to the players in the form of winnings and the remaining 5 euros will be the casino operator profit. Remember, the RTP indicates the return to players’ value for slots’ entire lifetime and not for a single session. To access the profitability of a slot machine for a single session, we’ll have to understand the concept of volatility.
What is Slot Volatility?
The volatility of a slot machine indicates how likely the slot machine is to offer prizes, what types of prizes can be expected, and how often they can be received. There are three ranges of volatility, high, low, and medium. The high volatility slots have higher payouts, but they come slowly; therefore, the risk factor is higher. Low volatility slots can produce faster payouts, but those payouts will be way smaller than those produced by the high volatility slots. Lastly, the slots having their volatility in the middle tends to balance the risk to win factor.
Knowing the volatility of a slot machine is essential because players can select the games that best suit their expectations with this information. For example, if a player prefers to get bigger prizes, they will have to choose a slot with high volatility; if you prefer to get smaller but more frequent prizes, low volatility slots will be more suitable.
Findings
After viewing all of the concepts, we can say that the slot layouts do affect your winning. However, you’ll also have to consider the slot’s volatility and RTP before making your choice.
