Banking Slot Machines

One way a potential slot machine "pro" might be able to gain an advantage playing slots is by playing "banking slot machines". These are slot machines which have bonus games-within-a-game that are supposed to entice slot players to play longer. A portion of money is put into the banked jackpot on the game within a game, and when that jackpot gets high enough, a game could theoretically have a return over 100%.

The problem is that in order to calculate how high the banked amount would need to be is dependent on estimates, since the actual payback percentage on specific slot machines is an unknown number. You can make a pretty good guesstimate of what that payback percentage is, but there's no way to calculate it exactly using mathematics, like you can with video poker.

Some of the slot machine games that fall into this category of banking slot machines include:

• Piggy Bankin'
• Buccaneer Gold
• Safe Cracker
• Pirates Treasure
• Fort Knox
• Boom!

Charles W. Lund wrote a book about beating slot machines based on this theory. The book is titled Robbing the One-Armed Bandits: Finding and Exploiting Advantageous Slot Machines. I haven't read the book yet, but I understand that he explains in some degree of detail how to find the right games, how to estimate what the jackpot needs to be in order for the game to be profitable, and what to do about it.

His book (from what I understand) covers other ways of gaining an advantage playing the slots, with varying degrees of ethical implications. But after reading a little bit about this theory, and looking at a couple of review of Charles Lund's book, I definitely have something new to add to my reading list.