A great deal has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A great article by Steve Bourie is titled, "Are Slot Machines Honest?" and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a whole lot of "variations" (being polite) than can deceive the player. As always, they can be all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

On the flip side, online casino slots use an electronic "random number generator" or RNG, operating inside a really large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of people that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There isn't any "sense switch" (see the Bourie article) that will be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG matches the last use, and may be the exact same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, however the pattern of randomness never changes. This is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines also can have payout percentages as low as 83%, which isn't true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the other machines. You may see the payout percentages for many safe online casino slot gaming sites, and also you shall see that it rarely drops below 95% - that is, the home makes a 5% profit, on the regular. Actually, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% - 98% range. This means that you can spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, as well as on a typical it shall cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward is the high-paying win. And also the high-paying win is balanced, remember, by a number of players who lose and finance that win.

So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. That's a far cry from the matter with land-based slot machines, appropriately called "one-armed bandits".

Players get better odds, they get absolute consistency across all games - but no one can guarantee a win every time. That is just the nature of gambling, and that's a component of the thrill.