Winning Online Slot Strategy

• How to Win with Good Online Slot Strategy
• The Best Online Slots Are Always Available
• Other Stuff You Should Know
• Choosing the Right Online Slot for a Winning Strategy
• “Bonus” Online Slots
• What's the Strategy if You Have a Good Win, but You Haven’t Met the Wagering Requirement?
• How Do You Find the Best Online Slot Machines for the Strategy?
• How Do You Choose the Best Online Slot Bonuses for the Strategy?
• A Winning Example

How to Win with the Best Online Slot Strategy

Winning online slot strategy comes down to a few main points. 1. You have to play on the slot bonuses offered by online casinos. 2. You have to play the right slot machines. 3. You have to bet aggressively to give yourself more frequent big wins, instead of betting weakly and passively hoping for infrequent jackpots. 4. You have to learn how to set the right win targets and stop playing once you've hit them. That is extremely important, because it's the only way to avoid always grinding away and giving your wins back!

Below, we are going to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it for every part of winning online slot strategy. But be sure to come back often to check for new strategy tips. New online slots and casinos and bonuses, and new winning online slot strategies, continue to develop, and we want you to be in on them when they arrive.

Online slots are essentially just like slots in live casinos. You play them the same (just click the "Spin" button), and the random number generator in their software—which decides what's going to show up on the paylines—runs exactly the same. Also, their artwork and bonus features are similar to the slots in the top Las Vegas casinos.

So, online slots are exactly like Las Vegas slots, except with three very important differences. These differences are what make it possible to win money over the long run with good online slot strategy, whereas you can only rarely win in the long run on land-based casino slots. Here are the differences:

1. Online slot players have a lot more options—literally hundreds of different types of slot machines to choose from at the click of a mouse.

2. Online slot players get free bonus money! And this is where your winnings come from, if you don't give them all back by playing too long!

3. Online slots are set looser! And having the house edge set lower on online slots lets you keep more of your bonus.

So, the strategy for winning at online slots is a four part approach that starts with these three important factors. Again: One—you have to be selective in choosing the best online slots to play for your goals. Two—you have to look for the most valuable bonuses you can find. And three—you can actually win at online slots because the house edge is usually set much lower than in land-based casinos. How much looser are online slots? Playing slots online means 4-6% more payback than if you play in land-based casinos! And those are percentages you will feel with more frequent wins.

The fourth part of the strategy is to avoid giving back your wins. We'll discuss this further below.

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The Best Online Slots Are Always Available

One great thing about playing slots online is that you can pick the right slot game for your strategy any time you want, without standing in line.

How many times have you gone into a casino in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or anywhere else in the world and walked straight to the area where your favorite slot machines are located, only to find that the machine you wanted to play was taken by someone else?

And have you ever noticed the long lines that form in front of a progressive slot when its jackpot has grown into a real monster?

Online, we never have these types of problems. First, every slot machine in an online casino is always available, and no matter how many players are playing, they can’t tie up the machines with the biggest jackpots.

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Other Stuff You Should Know: The Don'ts

Don't expect to win every single time you play any slot machine, even when playing an online slot with a winning strategy. There will be some wins and some losses, and that’s inevitable. The key is to win more than you lose over the long run.

In fact, if you are betting very small per spin in hopes of winning more often, it's actually a bad strategy, unless you're looking mainly for entertainment. You'll tend to grind away your money to the house edge too often without ever leaving with the win you came for. You have to bet enough to hit a significant win target when you do win. That means you have to bet a big enough percentage of your deposit on each spin to give you a chance to hit that target. The goal is fewer big spins, not lots of teensy spins.

That means you need enough of a bankroll to get through the losses to get to your bigger wins. It also means discipline. When you reach your win targets, stop. Right away! Don't always burn through your wins by chasing bigger wins! Every bit of that extra wagering you're giving while chasing is costing you a fraction of each bet in house edge.

And don't play on money you can't afford to lose in the short run. If you are stressed out because you are playing on money you can't afford to lose, you might start making bad choices on bet size and bonuses to go for. Never chase your losses. If you have a loss, let it go, and try again another day.

Also, don't get addicted to one particular online slot machine! There are two main different types of slot machine when it comes to online slot strategy, and you have to choose the best machine for your win goals and strategy. You know that beer commercial where people argue about whether the beer is “less filling” or “tastes great”? With slots, we want to talk about which ones let us “last longer” or “pay great.”

We don’t often find both of these features in the same machine. On some online slots, we’ll last a long time because there are lots of small payouts that keep us going. The “pays great” machines, on the other hand, have a habit of eating up our money pretty quickly if we don’t hit something—but if we do hit something, wow! It’s a great payout, and if you're playing the strategy right, big enough to make up for your other smaller losses!

How can you tell whether a slot machine is the “last longer” or “pays great” type?

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Choosing the Right Online Slot for a Winning Strategy: Look at the Slot Machine Pay Table and Features

The pay table of an online slot machine tells us a lot about how often that machine returns a big payout and how often it returns lots of smaller payouts.

Here’s how it works. The more symbols there are, the more winning combinations they'll make. The more the online slot is weighted toward numerous small payoffs, the longer you'll tend to last, but the less of a chance you'll have to get a big payout. And you really don't want to last that long without hitting your win target, because all you're doing then is getting ground away by the house edge.

The fewer the chances for a small payoff, by contrast, the more that you'll tend to hit the medium and higher payoffs you're going for.

Also, the bigger the top jackpot prize, the less often you'll hit the medium payoffs that are your bread-and-butter daily target. For most players using a winning strategy, the online slots with the biggest top jackpots are not a good deal, because you win them so seldom and they take up so much of the money that could go into smaller, more frequent prizes. You don't want to aim for such a big win that you use up your whole bankroll without much of a chance to hit it!

A good jackpot size for a winning online slot strategy is below $10,000 on multi-payline video slots, and $1000-$2000 on the classic 3-reel slots. Remember, on a typical 3-reel online slot at a Microgaming casino, the top jackpot hits only once out of every 264,000 spins on average. You want more of the machine's money in the middle payouts so you can survive until your turn to hit the big one!

Also, progressive jackpot online slots can definitely be part of a winning online slot strategy if you play them only when they are considerably bigger than their average hit point (because the jackpot size overcomes a good deal of the house edge then). But generally you should keep this play to a small percentage—say, 10%—of your overall slot budget or bankroll, and tend to aim for progressive jackpots below $100,000 (the smaller the better, as long as it's much bigger than its average hit point, because the smaller ones go off more frequently and give you more of a chance to hit them).

Remember, it's the medium payoffs that you're really aiming for in a winning online slot strategy, not the monsters, unless you're so rich that you can wait out losing spells indefinitely.

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Multi-line Bonus Online Slots are Often Good Strategy

Online bonus slots are not only fun (see our reviews of the new online slots) but are often excellent choices for putting into play a serious winning online slot strategy.

By bonus slot, I mean the slots where you get bonus rounds and free spins instead of just payouts for hitting combinations. These types of online slots don’t usually have their pay tables on the main screen. Instead, you must click on the Pay Table button to see the particular slot machine's winning combinations and bonus features, and whether it has “scatter” symbols and “wild” symbols—which increase the number of pays—or “multipliers” that usually decrease the frequency of payouts, but give you bigger payouts when you get them.

At Microgaming online casinos, look for the chart that appears at the lower right side of the Lobby screen when you highlight the name of a slot you are considering playing. The chart has exact information about the online slot’s features, such as whether it offers scatter symbols, bonus rounds, free spins or the “gamble” option. A few definitions…

“Wild” symbols work just like wild cards in poker. They can be any symbol you need for a payout. If the other symbols on a payline are part of a possible payout then the wild symbol will complete the combination and you get paid! Wild symbols tend to increase payouts. Wild symbols with multipliers are good for giving you more chances at the medium high win targets that are the goal in a winning online slot strategy. Wild symbols without multipliers are best when you're trying to last a long time without losing money.

The Rap Star in the Microgaming online slot Loaded is a good example of a combination of wild symbol and multiplier feature. When one of these symbols finishes on the payline, not only can it turn the line into a winning combination, but it will double or triple the payout. And if you complete a winning combination with two double symbols, the payout will be four times the regular payout.

“Scatter” symbols, like the dinner mints in Microgaming's online slot Harvey's, or the colosseums in Caesar's Empire at RTG casinos, are symbols that don’t have to be on the same line for you to get paid. Instead, you get paid a certain amount according to the total number of them that show up on a spin, wherever they are on the screen. Usually, there’s no payout on one scatter symbol, but as soon as you get two, you will get paid no matter where they appear. With three scatters, the payout goes up from two symbols, and the payouts just keep going up the more of them there are. Scatter symbols on online slots tend to make for more frequent small payouts that keep you lasting longer.

The most frequent type of juicy payout on an online bonus slot comes from the slot's bonus feature. Online slots like Pollen Nation or Fruit Frenzy offer “second-screen” bonuses. The slot machine will literally take you to a second screen where you must choose between images with a bonus hidden behind them. Once you make your choice and click on it, the bonus amount will be revealed to you, and you may receive another screen full of symbols to choose from to receive yet another bonus amount.

Other bonus slot machines, like Loaded, Harvey's, or Geisha Lounge’s Derby Dollars, offer “free spins” when the right combination of symbols come up. On most slots, the standard payouts are multiplied—doubled or sometimes tripled or more—on these free spins.

Another feature to look for as part of a winning online slot strategy is the “Gamble” feature. On slot machines with this feature, all wins can be gambled for double-or-nothing up to five times. This is a great way to go for a win target—essentially, it gives you a chance to manufacture your own jackpots instead of always waiting for that 1 in 264,000 shot! Say you have a 4-coin win—no big deal. But look at what happens if you gamble it five times and win all five gambles: It goes from 4 coins to 8, to 16, to 32, to 64, to 128! Even though you will lose half the time on a double-or-nothing bet, you win such bets much more frequently than you can hit a big jackpot. And you really never gambled more than your starting 4 coins!

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What if You Have a Good Win, but You Haven’t Met the Wagering Requirement?

What if you hit a nice win while you’re playing on a bonus in an online casino, but you haven't finished the wagering requirement? Be careful! You don’t want to give back the whole win while you are finishing the wagering requirement. Instead, avoid giving back most of that win by switching to a slot machine that takes smaller coins, especially the type of slot where you’ll last longer because there are lots of small payouts with no multipliers.

And as soon as you finish the wagering requirement, stop playing. It’s time to cash out and think of which of your favorite restaurants you should go to that night to celebrate.

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How Do You Find the Best Online Slot Machines?

That’s what we are here for! We’ve already put all that information together for you. Just go to our Best New Online Slots page for information on each slot's features! Look for the right size of jackpot and features like multipliers, scatters, wild symbols, and the double-or-nothing feature.

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How Do You Choose the Best Online Casinos with the Best Bonuses?

Once more, that’s what we are here for! We’ve already put all that information together for you too. We only list the best casinos we’ve found, where we’ve personally played and also gotten the right feedback from our players on bonus quantity and frequency, good service, and great games. So, look around High Stakes Lounge and read everything.

And check out our free play online casino slots and games too. These are actual online casino slots and games—the same as you'll find in the real Microgaming online casinos, provided courtesy of Spin Palace. Go ahead and try them out, and practice the strategies you'll use!

And if you’ve never played in online casinos before, be sure to go to our Online Casino How-To page that tells you everything you need to know about depositing your money (and withdrawing your wins).

A winning online slot strategy is a lot easier than you think! Play on the bonuses from online casinos. Look for online slots with smaller top jackpots to give you more of the medium wins that keep you alive. Look for multipliers and the double-or-nothing feature to give you more chances at your win targets. Look for last-longer online slots with lots of small payouts when you have to meet a wagering requirement. And avoid all unnecessary wagering that gives up more of your wins to the house edge.

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A Winning Example

Here is a fairly typical example of winning online slot strategy in action. I received a $200 sign-up bonus at Ruby Fortune for a $50 deposit. I decided to play the online slot Secret Admirer because it had the right size jackpot and only 15 paylines, so I knew that if I did win this time, my win would be big, at my target. (It also just felt lucky!)

I bet big on each spin, hoping to hit a really big free spin round. Then I hit a small payout when I was almost tapped out. I knew I didn't have enough money left to have much of a chance to win, so I decided to go for double-or-nothing on my payout. I won, and doubled again. Then I won again, and doubled once more. Now I had over $400 to play on!

Two spins later, I hit a free spins round, for a win of over $4000! I moved over to one of the 25-payline slots and bet a penny on each line to work through the wagering requirement, keeping almost all of my win.

It's true that there will be times when you do not hit those free spins. If that had happened this time, I would have been out $50. But that $200 bonus gave me 4x the chance to hit this win, and my online slot strategy keeps me winning more when I win, and losing less when I lose.

You can use this online slot strategy to win too. Go get 'em and good luck!