Every casino game has a payout/payback percentage. In fact you could argue that any form of risk, including the financial markets, has such a figure attached to it. We call the ‘payback percentage’ of any game in the casino, the amount of money a game pays back in relation to the amount of money the player pays in.

So if we had a new casino game and it had a payback percentage of 50%, the player could expect returns of 50 cents for every 1 rand spent on the game. No game has a payback percentage of 100% or more as this would stack the odds’ in the player’s favour as opposed to the casino’s or house’s (as people prefer to say) favour. The game of roulette features the famous green 0 outcome where the house wins all in order that that the game is always stacked in the house’s favour. Some games can be beaten in such a way that payback percentage can be in the players favour, and some classic examples of this are the so called biased wheel at roulette or card counting at blackjack. However, no game’s payback percentage causes more myth and mysticism than that of the slot game.

The average slot payback percentage is around 90%, but no player ever sits at a slot and puts 1 rand in and get 90 cents back by the last spin, slots simply aren’t made that way. The way a slot works is that a few players win big, hence the amazing jackpots available from some machines, while many players simply lose. This is because the wins appear in streaks or raves of spins where the player will accrue many wins. Slot jockeys all over will talk of a machine being ready to pay while they feed more credits into a slot.

So, as you may have guessed by now it’s not the slot’s payback percentage that causes the myth but rather the way the game pays. Players have tried many ways in which to influence machines going on streaks, including mythical stories of button combinations which could be tapped into a slot machine to get it to enter a development mode where the payback percentage is greater than 100%. Another popular myth around slot games is the belief that new machines have software that cranks the payback percentage up for the first couple of weeks the machine is in service. This is supposed to have the effect of making players play it for weeks afterwards still remembering those golden days; however, of course, this story is untrue.

Perhaps the most comedic interpretation of the payback percentage can be seen in UK pubs where the slot game will usually be a fruit machine. Players will treat the machine almost like it’s alive. This has lead to players believing the fruit machine is almost like an organic entity and when its paid its big jackpot, they believe the machine, much like a man after sex, is spent and will not payout again for at least another 20 minutes.