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

Conversely, online casino slots use an electronic "random number generator" or RNG, operating inside an extremely large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of people that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, and also more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There is no "sense switch" (see the Bourie article) that will be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each use of the RNG is the same as the last use, and can be the 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 just isn't true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the same winning percentage as another machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and you will see which it rarely drops below 95% - which is, the home makes a 5% profit, on a typical. Actually, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are in the 97% - 98% range. It means that you may spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and also on an average it will cost you $7.50. But players do not gamble to be average: the true reward will be the high-paying win. And the well-paying win is balanced, bear in mind, by a range 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. Which is a far cry from the situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called "one-armed bandits".

Players get better odds, they get absolute consistency across all games - but nobody can guarantee a win every time. That's just the nature of gambling, and that is a division of the thrill.