Early Casino Slots
When it comes down to it, the reels in casino slots are one of the most important elements of the entire machine. From their inception, casino slots have used the revolving mechanical devices known as reels to show the player which symbols they have managed to land after pulling the slot arm or, in some of the more modern slots, pushing the spin button.
In the early days of casino slots, machines often used the three reel system. One of the issues with using a three reel system instead of a four or more reel system is that the number of combinations on the slot was limited. That is to say they were cubic. Given that a reel had a total of ten symbols, ten to the third power is a total of one thousand. This means that the slot machine had a total of one thousand possible combinations that a player could get on any given spin.
While this might seem like a rather large number, the chance of getting any one of these combinations was point one percent. This made it quite limiting to the casinos running the machine as they could not risk big jackpots on a machine that was going to pay out the biggest amount possible once out of every thousand spins.
Eventually, this was remedied by increasing the number of symbols from a relatively small ten to a bit more moderate twenty two. This made it so there were roughly ten times the possible combinations as the slot machines with only ten symbols. Owners still found that these casino slots were still limiting in their jackpot sizes, and while ten thousand combinations was an improvement, it still wasn’t enough.
Electronics in Slots Introduced
It wasn’t until the early nineteen eighties that electronics started to be incorporated into casino slots. This was important because it allowed manufacturers to assign certain weights to individual symbols. Further computerisation of the industry allowed for individual symbols to be assigned a different probability on each one of the reels.
Physical to Virtual
While the levers and reels that are present on the best mobile casino nz slot machines are entertaining, they actually serve no purpose. Almost all of the modern day slots are considered video slots. In a video slot, there are zero moving parts. Instead of a physical reel spinning, the player sees graphics that appear on the screen. They might look like reels, but there is nothing inside the machine that is actually spinning. The bonus from this is that the slots can be made to be more engaging and interactive than their historical counterparts.
In addition, the virtual machine allowed for many, many paylines to be introduced. So instead of a single payline through the middle of the reels, there can be tens and even hundreds of different ways to win on each spin. The player can then choose how many paylines they’d like to play per spin and how much they would like to bet on each payline.
With modern machines, jackpot odds can be up to three million to one. This allows casinos to supply very large jackpots knowing that they will not lose money in the long run.