Online slots use RTP, volatility, and win multipliers to create different player experiences. Learn how random outcomes, payout potential and game design work together when choosing your favourite slot games.
Iceland has a mature gambling culture, with fans of the pastime enjoying a wide of variety of game types, including lottery games, live dealer games, crash games, and online slots.
Slots are by far one of the most frequently played games thanks to their diverse range of themes, settings, reel and row layouts, bonus features, and payout potential.
Then add the layer of fixed and progressive jackpots, and slots become one of the simplest (to play) yet complex (in design) games of chance that the online gambling industry has to offer.
One of the most common questions about online slots is whether their payouts are truly random. The short answer is yes.
Licensed casino software providers like Pragmatic Play, Games Global, and Yggdrasil use random number generators (RNGs) to determine the outcome of every spin.
These virtual machines are coded with an overall return to player (RTP) rate, while simultaneously delivering completely randomised game results.
These results do not take into account any individual player; the machine focuses on calculating results for the slot in question, and delivers them to the casino, and then to the player's account, which requests a result at that time.
The RNG has no external view of who wants to know what the next spin result it has generated is, only that one needs to be returned, ensuring fair play and totally random outcomes.
When playing at an online or mobile casino, the RTP percentage of your chosen slot game is worth taking note of.
The return-to-player rate of a game is the overall percentage of wagers that is expected to be paid back to customers who play the game. The most common RTP for slot games sits around the 96% mark.
Games that offer an RTP of less than 96% are deemed to be difficult to win on, while slots offering 97% and upwards are considered easier to win on.
This is a complete fallacy, of course, given that when providers calculate these return rates, they are done over millions of spins, which means your odds of winning from one spin to the next are hardly impacted in any meaningful way by these minor shifts in RTP.
What has a more direct impact on the payouts of any game of chance is the combination of its RTP with its built-in volatility.
The volatility of a slot machine has a direct impact on how a game feels when you play it over time. In short bursts, any game, regardless of RTP and variance, can feel like it's siphoning cash or paying out in spades.
What the volatility setting of a game controls is the balance between how often payouts occur and the size of those payouts. It also influences how many wagers it may take to receive a higher-value win multiplier.
It is worth noting that these rates and probabilities do not guarantee a set amount of krónur will be won.
What players typically notice when playing high variance slots is that it seems to take longer, so more spins are played between "big wins". But when these payouts hit, they tend to reward players with larger win multipliers.
Low volatility slots, on the other hand, appear to pay out more often, although these winning results tend to be on the lower end of the scale.
The takeaway from most slot players is that high-variance games are high-risk, high-reward, while their low-variance counterparts are low-risk, low-reward.
While this might be the emotional experience of long play sessions, the reality is that the overall payout potential of any slot is designed by the developer in advance, which is why we also need to consider the maximum win multiplier.
Now that we understand how the RTP and game volatility play off one another to create the pace and intensity of your favourite video slots, it is time to dig into win multipliers.
Casino games are not designed around paying out specific cash amounts; instead, all wins are calculated as multiples of the bet you placed at the start of the round you just won.
In practice, this works as follows. If you bet 100 kr on a slot pull and received a winning combination of symbols that pays out 200x (which means 200 times your bet), the casino will award you 20.000 kr.
One of the metrics to consider when choosing which slots to play, alongside RTP and volatility, is the game's maximum win multiplier.
On a practical level, if there are two slot machines with the same in-game features, setting, art style, volatility and return-to-player rate, but one has a max win of 1,000x while the other is 20,000x, you should choose the game with the bigger payout potential.
However, since we always caution playing for fun, not profit, your first consideration when choosing a game at your top online casino should be how much you enjoy playing it, which is why the list above begins with emotional preferences like art style, setting and gameplay.
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