If you could examine the state of the bearings on the reels of mechanical slots, ascertain where the reel stopped last time it was used and factor in things like temperature and ongoing wear and tear you could, in theory, predict where the reel will stop on its next spin.

In the same way, no gaming outcome is truly random. It’s been said that the flap of a butterfly’s wings a thousand years ago can eventually lead to a chain of events that triggers an earthquake in the present day, and this is entirely true even if it sounds preposterous. Every outcome is dependent on what preceded it. So How Do Online Slot Machines Work to Produce Random Outcomes Using Software?īefore answering that question, it’s worth bearing in mind that nothing in life is truly random. The age of the microchip and the printed circuit board was in full swing by that point, and it was inevitable that electronic slots would take over from mechanical slots. A solution was needed that was more reliable, as any player finding that the reels got stuck or didn’t spin properly after making a substantial bet would quite rightly make a complaint. How to Reduce Maintenance Costs and Improve Reliabilityįully-mechanical slots – the kind you’d see on a Vegas casino floor until the 1970s – proved to be immensely popular, eventually taking more revenue than any of the table games on offer, but maintaining the complex machinery inside them wasn’t easy and proved to be highly labour intensive. This made them as random as a roulette wheel, and these work today just as unpredictably as they always have done. Prior to the methods used nowadays, mechanical slots still offered random payouts, as their reels were subject to a variety of physical parameters, like where the reel stopped after the previous spin, how worn the bearings were that made them turn and other factors that were impossible to predict. Catches, control cams, spring-mounted cam plates and kicker paddles worked in harmony with one another to ensure that every spin saw the reels spin fast and then stop, one by one, to make each outcome as exciting as possible. How Do Mechanical Slots Work Without Random Number Generators?īack in the early twentieth century when mechanical slots were first making an impact on the world, a complex mechanism was used to get mechanical slots going, their reels spinning and then coming to a halt. Modern slots use sophisticated, digitally-driven random number generators to determine the outcome of each spin – but mechanical slots have been around a lot longer than the microchip.

Mechanical slot machine sounds