Basically, but not exactly. I think you have the idea, but rather than say that the wins are "the amount of payout provided by each wheel", it would be better to say "the total of the payouts provided by the winning combinations of ALL reels," because the winners are not determined by each single reel alone.
I read the article and everything the author states is correct -- oversimplified, but correct.
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In other words there is no way to up the payout percentage of a slot machine unless you change out the game itself to one that has a higher percent payout as defined by the game itself.
That's right
but if you had, say, a Double Diamond game in your machine, you could still keep that game and change the payout percentage. Keep in mind that the newer slot machines do this by changing a chip on a computer board; they usually don't need to change the physical reel strips. They can do this because the chip contains the true reel strips that are used and they are much longer than the physical strips that you see. These internal strips are called "virtual", and they are mapped back onto the physical strips.
On the older mechanical slots, they would have had to physically remove and replace the reels to change the payback.
To look at the modern computer slots using the example in that article, let's take his example of a slot with three physical reel strips, each with a single R, G, and B listed on them. In the article, he demonstrates that there would be 27 combinations when using these strips, which would be correct if there were only the three stops on each reel.
What the modern slot does is to have more than one of each symbol mapped on the virtual reels inside the chip. So internally, there might be only one R, but two G's and three B's. That would mean that there were six positions on each reel, or 216 (6*6*6 = 216) different combinations instead of only 27. Now what happens is that if the computer picks any of the three B's when selecting the outcome for a reel, it spins the PHYSICAL reel that you see to the same one-and-only B printed on the reel. The player only sees three symbols, but the computer sees six and reuses the physical positions more than once.
The only thing that changes when a different percentage chip is inserted is that the computer's virtual strips change. So instead of one R, two G's and three B's, maybe now it has two R's, two G's and two B's. That changes the payback, but the physical strips that the player sees in the window don't change at all.
Hope this helps. You can also check out "Rick's FAQ Files" section to learn more about how slots work. Click on the blue button under the banner ads at the top of the page.
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