Slot machines give you the option of choosing how much you want to wager, but how can you decide on your stake?
There are a few key points to take into account when looking at the amount you want to bet.
Consider Your Goals
The first step is to ask yourself why you’re playing slots just now? Are you hoping to win a lot of money or do you just want to have some fun and spin the reels for as long as possible?
If you’re hoping to grab a big win, then you might be keen to play with a large stake. However, if you’re just looking for some fun as you play you might think that using smaller stakes makes more sense.
Since slot machines have a completely random outcome, there’s no way of knowing which of these approaches will have the greatest chances of success. This means you’re just looking at it in terms of what suits you.
Think About Strategies
Ok, so what if you want to know about the amount to put into the machines to suit a strategy. Well, we need to work out first of all what sort of slots strategy might work bearing in mind what we have just seen about the results being random.
There are a couple of key factors to take into account here. The first is the return to player (RTP), which tells us how much the slot pays out to all of its players. While a high number looks better, the truth is that it doesn’t really tell you how much you can hope to get back from it.
The RTP is worked out over many spins, so it doesn’t tell you what it pays back on 10, 20 or even 100 games. However, we can use the law of large numbers to assume that the more you play the closer you should get, theoretically, to this number.
Let’s put it this way, if you play a single spin with $1,000 you could lose the $1,000, break even, or win a lot of money. But if you were to split that money out over thousands of spins then the chance of getting close to the RTP increases.
This leads us on to volatility, which is the measure of variance in the results. A low volatility slot tends to have smaller wins more often. On the other hand, if it’s high volatility then you can expect bigger wins but also non-winning streaks.
Therefore, the most adventurous strategy is to play with high stakes on a high volatility slot, as anything could happen. Play a lot of spins with low stakes on a low volatility game and you’ll hope to win a high percentage what you put in, although this can vary widely.
Managing your bankroll is the most important thing you can do to increase your chances of winning at slots. For example, what if you run out of cash just before a big win was about to hit? Or if you can’t play for as long as you’d planned to because of poor planning?
Try to work out a bet level that lets you carry on playing even if you don’t get a win on your early games. Unless you’re just wanting to play a few spins, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t run out of funds too soon.
Look at the Rules
Does the slot you want to play give you any sort of incentive to increase your stake? This is sometimes the case where there’s a progressive jackpot to be won. In some of these games, you can see that the top prize can only be won with the maximum bet amount.
In other slots, the amount of the wager doesn’t matter, while in other cases it can affect your chances to some degree. As for the standard wins, these are paid as a multiplier of your stake so you’ll win the same amount multiplied by your bet level every time regardless of the staked amount.
Check the Min and Max Bets
Finally, every slot online that you play tells you exactly how much you can wager on it. This is shown in the form of minimum and maximum bets levels, with a number of options in between these two extremes.
Generally speaking, you can start playing from just a few cents on each spin if you want to. Or you could go up to the maximum and play with hundreds of dollars every time you hit the button to spin those reels.
By this stage, you should have an idea how much you want to play with, so you just need to select the amount and start playing. As long as you’ve got funds in your account, you can keep playing. If you prefer, you can choose to play a demo version for dummy cash instead.