A whole lot has been written about the honesty of land-based slot gamble - Full Record - machines. A good article by Steve Bourie is titled, "Are Slot Machines Honest?" and originally appeared within the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It may 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're all illegal and do not happen. But read the article, closely.

In contrast, 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 folks 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's no "sense switch" (see the Bourie article) that may be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each use of the RNG is the same as the final use, and also will be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, though the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.

Land-based slot machines could also have payout percentages as low as 83%, which is not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as another machines. You may see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also 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. This means that you may spend per hour, gamble your $100 stake about three times, and on a typical it will cost you $7.50. But players don't gamble to be average: the true reward is the high-paying win. As well as the high-paying win is balanced, as always, 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. That is a far cry from the specific situation 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 part of the thrill.

So the next time you want to play a slot machine, even if there is a land-based casino right next door, you are better advised to go to your computer and play the internet casino slots. They're a far better bet.