Slots
From their humble
beginnings as distraction for casual gamblers, and for the wives of
high-rollers, slot machines have grown to a level that nowadays they
pretty much represent the backbone of the gambling and online
gambling industry.
Everyone likes slot
machines. Players and the gambling public in general like them
because they’re easy to play and they require no special knowledge
or high-level strategy to master. On top of that, they’re fun too.
Casinos love them because they represent one of the most lucrative
investments for their business.
If you embark on a tour
of the nations’ most off-the-beaten-road gambling facilities, you’ll
find many rag-tag, secluded and very small establishments most of
which are pretty short on just about any real casino games, except –
you guessed it – slots.
The reason for this is
that casino owners would rather cram 10-20 slot machines into the
one small room that they have, instead of putting a poker table in
there. As interesting a game as live poker is, it’s still no match
for slots when it comes to earning money for the casino.
Online casinos – where
physical space is obviously not a problem – feature hundreds of
types of slots too. Some of the wildest online gamblers are slot
machine addicts. There’s just something in the way these machines
charm their players into their world of easy-money, flashy colors
and pleasantly intricate payout system.
On their way to
becoming the gambling superpower they are today, slot machines went
through quite a few changes over time themselves. The initial slot
machines were entirely mechanical devices. Based on a complex system
of rotating wheels attached to shafts and gear systems (used for
mechanical delay) the early slot machines were relatively easy to
calculate odds for. Since they had a fixed number of symbols printed
on each of their reels, players could find out exactly what the
chances of a winning combination coming up were.
As technology
progressed and electricity slowly made its presence felt in every
area of human activity, slot machines were revolutionized too. The
reels were no longer put in motion by the mechanical force conveyed
through the shaft and the pull-lever, but rather by
electricity-driven motors and the break paddles were actuated by
coils.
Still, the basic
principle remained, and the winning lines were brought up
mechanically.
The latest step in the
evolution of the slot machine was the introduction of
microprocessors and the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) or LCD (Liquid
Crystal Display) displays.
Nowadays, in a video
slot machine, there are no mechanical elements at work whatsoever.
Everything is driven by electronics, and the spinning reels that you
see on the screen are merely virtual ones, part of the user
interface meant to make it easy to understand for the human player
what really goes on in the background.
The “brain” of the
whole system, a central processing unit, runs a random number
generator. This RNG determines the sequence of symbols that show up
on your screen, it detects winning combinations, it pays you out,
and generally it does everything needed to operate the machine.
These very same functions can also be performed by your home
computer system, thus online slots and real live video slots can be
interlinked in order to give birth to huge progressive slots.
This evolution also
made it possible for programmers to create a never-before seen
diversity of slot machines. The numbers of reels used for these
virtual slots can be anything between 3 to
God-knows-what-they’ll-think-of-next.
If you’re a more
traditional slot-machine lover though, don’t worry. Good old
mechanical “one armed bandits” are still being manufactured today.
Heck, if you’re truly into these wonderful examples of mechanical
engineering, you can even have one built according to your own
specifications.
