noun
/ ˈslɑːt məˌʃiːn / (UK also fruit machine) a machine that you try to win money from by putting coins into it and operating it, often by pressing a button or pulling a handle. The slot payout percentages published in Strictly Slots and Casino Player represent the average percent of each slot wager that is returned to the players in jackpots. For penny, nickel, quarter, 50-cent, one-dollar and even five-dollar machines, these percentages tend to reflect a large amount of play. The horizontal line located at the center of the slot machine's screen is called a payline. In order for a spin to win, the winning symbols must align on the payline. While slot machines first emerged, they had only one payline, positioned right in the middle of the screen. Eventually, the number increased to three, five, and more.
1British A vending machine selling small items.
‘The slot machine sells sex toys, erotic lingerie, massage oil and condoms.’- ‘I remember on a rare trip to the seaside (the beach was out of bounds, full of barbed wire and gun emplacements) gazing at a long-empty slot machine that had once held chocolate bars and now appeared as a rusting icon from outer space.’
- ‘The reason I'm thinking about this, whilst I sit in the pub, drinking my pint - sorry, I'm in a pub - is because I can see a girl standing next to the slot machine, dressed in pink.’
- ‘The only other two in operation were DIY, where the hapless customer is expected to swipe groceries past an electronic eye and then fiddle about feeding credit cards or cash into a slot machine to pay for them.’
- ‘The ordinary idea of a slot machine logically involves the idea of a device in which some mechanism or other is set in operation by the coin, which in some way delivers the appropriate goods.’
- ‘If the government's central concern was the reduction in teenage pregnancies, the sensible thing would be to make the morning-after pill available cheaply - perhaps via slot machines in easily accessible places.’
- ‘A motorway service station may seem an odd place to remember 12 murder victims, but yesterday the bugler's Last Post called out amid the slot machines and coffee bars with haunting beauty.’
- ‘I suppose we ought to shut down every library, then find a way of building slot machines into books so that you have to keep putting 10p pieces in every few minutes in order to keep the pages turning.’
- ‘But let them run around cobbled streets, put old pennies in Victorian slot machines and try on historic costumes, and you'll find a very different reaction.’
- ‘And I finally found out during a visit to Old Penny Memories, a working collection of antique slot machines in Bridlington.’
- ‘The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, says: ‘Prayer is not a penny in the slot machine, you can't just put in a coin and get out a chocolate bar at the bottom.’
- ‘Will you admit that you've been treating me like some kind of slot machine?’
- 1.1North American A fruit machine.‘Pachinko is a combination of slot machine and pinball game; players can control only the speed at which small stainless-steel balls are fed into the devices.’
- ‘It's a very special relationship and I've seen it on both video game players and on slot machine players and the industry will say that gambling problems are purely from within the individual.’
- ‘As time progressed, computerised versions and all sorts of clever entertainments have been merged into the basic game so that a Pachinko machine is often more like a Fruit Machine or slot machine than a ball game.’
- ‘Delaware Park plans to incorporate a new player tracking component in its racing and slot machine gaming systems.’
- ‘I fail to see how risking your hard-earned money on the outcome of a sporting event, the random machinations of a slot machine, or the numerical suicide of a lottery makes life more interesting.’
- ‘At the conclusion of each level the player is presented with the chance to play a slot machine game for extra men.’
- ‘As a result, shares of the slot machine and video game manufacturer edged up from $33.48 to $34.63.’
- ‘I put some money in a slot machine, and I won my first try.’
- ‘They would, he warned, use bingo as a ‘loss-leader’ and encourage players to try their hand at more addictive slot machine games.’
- ‘This is not some sort of con game or high tech slot machine.’
- ‘In my opinion, nobody has ever had a gun held to his head and been forced to go into a casino and put money into a slot machine.’
- ‘You get what you pay for, Petal, and in the bar scene it is very much a case of putting the money in the slot machine and waiting to see if you win a prize.’
- ‘Players know that it determines the symbols that land on the pay line on a slot machine and the cards they're dealt on a video poker machine.’
- ‘As far as the slot machine goes, it really is an easily understood game, simple without being boring, with well laid out pay tables and easy to understand bonuses.’
- ‘Since the modern slot machine is programmed to select number series at random, no amount of finessing of the handle can change what has been decided.’
- ‘The basic premise of a slot machine is randomness to the extreme.’
- ‘I took a look at products from all the major slot machine manufacturers, and will give my impressions on new games over the next several weeks.’
- ‘I used to put minutes, quarter-hours, half-hours into this game, like ever larger sums into a slot machine.’
- ‘Collier is not alone in his fondness for the slot machine, an electronic poker game known locally as a ‘pokie’.’
- ‘This is my retirement money and if I want to put it in a slot machine, it's nobody's business but my own.’
Slot machines are more fun when you understand what’s going on with the game. If you don’t know what the slot machine symbols mean, and if you don’t know what it takes to get a winning combination, you might as well just play rocks scissors and paper with some stranger.
The purpose of this post is to take a detailed look at some of the inner workings of slot machines, especially as it relates to the slot machine symbols most commonly in use.
The traditions behind why slot machines use bar and fruit symbols are decades old, and the history of slot machines is fascinating all by itself.
In this post, I explain what the different slot machine icons mean and why it matters to the average player.
1-What Does the Bar Symbol Mean on a Slot Machine?
Slot machines have been around since the 1890s. You’d find these early slot machine games in bars and taverns in cities like New York and San Francisco. When gambling became illegal, these businesses started giving away candy and chewing gum instead of money.
Imagine going into a bar today and putting money into a slot machine with the opportunity to win a free drink or a cigar.
That’s what gambling in a tavern was like in the 1890s.
What does the bar symbol mean?
Think about what it looks like.
It’s a rectangle, right?
My first guess would be that the bar symbol on a slot machine symbolized a candy bar, but that would be too big. After all, keep in mind that the idea was to have prizes that were small, like coins.
The bar symbols on slot machines represent sticks of chewing gum — specifically, BAR chewing gum. (It was a popular brand of the Bell-Fruit Gum Company at the time.) They were in color in those days, and different colors meant different flavors of gum.
Slot machine makers still use bar symbols out of tradition, even though I’ve never seen a slot machine game that offers gum as a prize.
2- What Do the Fruit Symbols Mean on a Slot Machine?
Just as the bar symbol meant you were going to win chewing gum, the various flavors of fruit-inspired candy were prizes you could win. Cherry symbols meant winning cherry-flavored candy.
Apples meant winning apple-flavored candy. Oranges and plums, well… They meant you won dragonfruit and huckleberry flavored candy.
Just kidding.
Obviously, the picture of the fruit in question represented the flavor of candy you won.
And, again, the reason these symbols are still in use have more to do with tradition than anything else. People are just used to seeing these symbols on these games.
3- How Many Different Symbols Are There on a Slot Machine?
An average slot machine game might have about 20 symbols on each reel. This does NOT imply that each symbol has a 1/20 probability of coming up on a spin, though.
Modern slot machines use a random number generator to determine their results. These are actually random — they’re not fixed or rigged in any way.
The casino makes its money because the prize schedule for a slot machine game pays prizes in such a way that the game is inherently profitable.
Think about it this way:
Suppose you played a casino game where you had a 1 in 600 probability of winning, but when you won, you only got a payout of 500 to 1.
Do you see how that would be profitable for the casino?
You’d lose $1 on 599 spins, but you’d win $500 on the one spin, for a net loss of $99.
Such a game would have a house edge of around 17%, on average.
The payouts on a slot machine game are more complicated than that, but it’s the same principle.
4- What Are the Odds of Winning on a Slot Machine?
Here’s the thing about slot machines:
You don’t know what the odds of winning are.
And, to an extent, the odds of winning are irrelevant. What you’re really concerned about is the payback percentage.
That’s a ratio that compares the odds of winning with the amount you win. Over time, it represents the long-term average of how much money the casino will win from you on each bet.
Most slot machines have a hit ratio of about 1 in 3 or 1 in 4.
So it’s fair to see that on most slot machines, your odds of winning something are 3 to 1 or 2 to 1.
The problem is that the payouts aren’t commensurate with these odds of winning.
Also, slot machines pay off bets on an X for Y basis rather than an X to Y basis.
In blackjack, your payouts are in addition to what you risked. Bet $5 on a blackjack hand and win, and you get a 1 to 1 payout, or even money. You get your $5 bet back with $5 in winnings.
Gambling machines, though, pay back with odds on a 1 “for” 1 basis. Bet $5 on a spin of the slot machine reels, and you get $5 in winning in exchange for your $5 bet.
The machine acts like it’s a win, but the reality is that it’s a push.
This is also one of the reasons slot machines measure their odds using payback percentage rather than house edge.
When a slot machine game has a 90% payback percentage, it means that on average you get back 90% of each bet. Place a $5 bet, and you’ll get an average of $4.50 back over time — which means you’ll lose 50 cents per bet on average.
And that’s just the average including any jackpots you win. If you play in the short-term and don’t see a jackpot, you’ll usually see a lower payback percentage until you get some winnings and catch up.
5- Which Slot Machine Has the Best Payout?
How do you know which slot machine has the best payout?
The short answer to this question is easy enough:
You don’t.
You have NO WAY of knowing which machine has better payouts than the other machines. In fact, you can play an identical slot machine next to the one you started on and be facing a different payback percentage.
The casinos have no rhyme or reason in terms of where they place the higher and lower payout machines.
Bar Slot Machine Meaning Games
In the long run, it doesn’t even really matter. If you play a negative expectation game long enough — and slots are ALWAYS a negative expectation game — you’ll eventually lose all your money.
Stop worrying about which slot machine has the best payout.
Worry instead about how much fun you’re having — or not. If you don’t enjoy a specific game, move on to another game.
Triple Gold Bars Slot Machine
6- Why Are They Called “Slot” Machines?
They’re called slot machines because you put your money into a slot to play.
When they were first invented, slot machines only worked on a literal coin-in and coin-out basis.
Now, of course, most slot machines work by accepting bills and spitting out a piece of paper with the amount you’re owed on it.
But we haven’t changed the name of the games.
Also, it’s not called a slot machine in other countries, always. In the United Kingdom, they’re called fruit machines. In Australia, they’re called “pokies,” which is short for poker machines.
That last nomenclature comes from their original nature — the first slot machines, which predated the machines that gave away candy — used playing cards to produce random results instead of symbols on metal reels.
7- Who Invented the Slot Machine?
According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, as well as many other legitimate sources, Charles Fey invented the first slot machines.
He born in Bavaria but was making his living as a mechanic in San Francisco when he invented slot machines in 1894. It didn’t take long for him to be doing so well that he started a factor to produce more slot machines.
The first 3-reel slot machine with machine-generated payouts in real money was invented in 1898, also by Charles Fey. The Liberty Bell, which most modern slot players would recognize as a real slot machine, came along in 1899 — another Fey invention.
There are only 4 Liberty Bell machines still extant.
Also, it didn’t take long for other companies, like the Mills Novelty Company, to steal Fey’s invention and start making money from their own versions of it.
Bar Top Slot Machine
Finally
Those are the most accurate and concise answers to some of the most common questions about slot machines and their symbols on the internet.
What other questions do you have besides what do the symbols mean?
Leave me a note in the comments, and I’ll respond with an answer if I can.