Many people gravitate towards slot machines because of their simplicity. Pull a lever, see if the symbols match and you could be a winner!
There isn’t as much strategy involved as other casino games, but there is one element that you can control in slots to improve your odds of winning. You can select the number of lines that are played each time.
For my English final I teach how to create a slot machine program. Please forgive the ramble in the back my hard-drive is not a solid state so it likes to ma.
And that’s where the confusion can set in.
What are the advantages of playing more or less lines? How do you select the lines? And how many should you select?
Keep reading to learn more about how lines work in slots and how to decide the number of lines to play.
What Are Paylines
The technical gambling term for the lines on a slot machine is paylines. There is a reason for that name. What shows up on the lines determines whether or not you win.
Today, there are countless slot machines with varying numbers of paylines. Some video slot machines have up to 25+ lines that can be played at once. However, many physical slot machines have somewhere between 3-5 lines, and classic models only have a single line.
More Lines, More Chances to Win
In general, the more lines you play, the more chances you have to win. But the more lines you play to, the more each spin is cost. Makes sense given that the house is more likely to lose when more lines are played.
A number of professional poker players and poker enthusiasts have created payout tables based on the number of lines played for a specific type of slot machine. This gives them a clearer idea of their odds before spinning.
Know How Combinations Can Be Made Across Lines
Java String Find All Matches
If you’re playing numerous lines, there may be more than one way to win. Making matches straight across a line is the standard way to win if you’re playing a single line. With multiple lines you may be able to make matches vertically and diagonally as well.
Special Considerations
Before choosing a slot machine and the number of lines to play, take these special considerations to mind:
Cost per line : The cost per line can range from one penny on up.
Payout : The cost to spin should justify the potential payout. Also, check whether matches with four or five symbols in a row offer better payouts.
How winning matches are made : Many multi-line slot machine award wins for horizontal, vertical and diagonal matches.
Number of symbols needed to win : typically 3-4 in a row. This affects the odds of lining up symbols vertically and diagonally.
Sometimes the odds will be better than others. The four factors above will help you decide how many slot machine paylines you should spin each time.
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A couple of years ago, when I was learning Java programming, I thought of testing myself and my programming skills by writing a game in Java. Now, I'm not going to call it 'game programming', since game programming is way more than what I did. In fact, what I did was just a test for me. So I decided to write a game I was playing on my old Nokia E50 phone, a Slot Game.
This slot game I was playing on my phone was really simple. It had only 3 slots with different items in each. You had to push the Spin button in order to spin the slots, and you would win a small amount of coins if two or three slots were alike. Of course, 3 slots were better than 2. It is not really hard to make a game like this, but for a beginner it is good to start with. As I remember, this was probably the first program that I could tell others: “Look at what I just did!”
So I started working on it (I remember using NetBeans at that time), firstly as console-only, and then using GUI. The first thing I did, was deciding what kind of images (actually their names, not the images themselves) I would use. I wrote this line of code:
I also decided what would be the amount of “money” that the user would win if he matched two or three symbols:
After that, I went on writing the code that was suposed to randomly choose one of the elements in the symbols array. This could be done by using the Math.random() method, or by calling the nextInt() method at a Random instance, or by the wrong way I used to do at the beginning:
Of course, I soon switched to calling Math.random(), and in order to get a number that I could use as an index for my array, I wrote this block of code:
So the variable choice was the random index that I could use to get a random item from the array (keep in mind that Math.random() returns a double between 0.0 and 1.0)
So after choosing 3 random items, I just printed them out at the console, saying whether there were none, two or three matches, and calculating the amount of money won, if there was any, with the given coefficient. It was a good start; I only had to think of the UI, and I suck at UI design. But for this one, all that I needed was a really simple design which I managed to code as I was planning.
For the items to show at slots, I just googled them and found 12 of them in a single sprite. I downloaded the sprite and started my old photo editing software which sometimes can really be magical; Microsoft Paint! I started cropping images from the sprite, paying attention to their dimensions that should be the same, 122px by 114px. Why these magical values? Just because!
What was left to do, was the UI. I could use the really-helpful drag-and-drop UI builder that ships with NetBeans, but I wanted to do it myself. I had a really hard time figuring out which kind of layout to use, since the only one I really knew was GridLayout. Anyway beside that, I managed to use FlowLayout and BorderLayout. There is a difference between them, but I’m not really capable of pointing that out, so you can check the online JavaDoc for them.
I managed to build the game, and started to play it. I figured out that the coefficients for multiplying the bet were too damn high, but I didn’t care as long as I knew that the game worked.
My bad practices
As you can see, the source code of this simple game is in only one file. This is something that I don’t like to do anymore. A better way to do it is by making the code as modular as it can be. By building small modular elements, dividing the UI from the logic of the application, you help yourself during the testing and debugging phase. So the first thing that I would like to change, is dividing the whole class Slots extends JFrame from the class that calls it.
This is done by firstly creating a file called Slots.java that will contain only the code for the UI. Then, creating an ActionListener that will listen to different button clicks (there are 5 different buttons). Finally, creating a class called App.java that will only create a Slots instance and make it run.
Basically, the App.java would look like this:
As I remember, SwingUtilities.invokeLater() is used to divide the UI thread from other threads, so if any UI changes are needed, they won’t stall the application.
The Listener class, which might be called something like SlotButtonListener, might be something like this:
And finally, in the Slots class there would be only the code for defining the UI of the game. All the buttons would have SlotButtonListener as action listener.
Anyone who wants to change the code following these advices is free to do it. You can fork it anytime you want.
Do you have any Java programming advice for me? Feel free to comment below