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Payback Vs. Frequency

Slots players know that the machines that they play are set to pay back at a percentage over time. Most players know that machines give more pays then others. The terms for the different ideas are Payback and Frequency.

Payback is what most slots players know. It is the percentage that the machine is set to pay back to the players over the course of its life. There can be a huge range of payout percentages for any machine. These usually range from as low as 75% up to 99% for some high-visibility machines. Not a lot of casinos will have the payback percentages on their machines, but the ones that do are trying to entice people to come and play those machines because of their larger payout figures. Just remember that you can have the same machines side-by-side and have them set to very different payback percentages.

A lot of players will play a machine that doesn’t pay out often and refer to it as a cold machine or a tight machine. A lot of players think that these machines have lower payback percentages, but this relates to the frequency of the machine and not the payback.

Frequency is a different thing. Frequency is related to how often the machine pays out. The machines that have multiple reels and pay lines are a prime example of this. As an example, if you play a machine that has 5 pay lines wagering a single coin on each, you may get regular returns of 2-3 coins from your wins. This means that they frequency of the machine paying out is high.

Most of the time it’s easy to spot machines that have a higher hit frequency. They usually make themselves obvious by being the multiple-pay line machines that have payouts of coins that are less then the number of pay lines on that machine. This is because most players will play all of the pay lines to maximize their chance of winning, but when they win they win less then they would have originally bet, so they are still behind overall.

With everything that you know, it’s really up to you to decide the sort of machine that you want to play. Do you want to play a machine that pays back smaller amounts more often, or do you want to play a machine that pays out less often, but with bigger prizes.