A new online casino opens every week. It’s difficult to keep track of everything. Unfortunately, among the many new openings, there are also a few bankruptcies because it’s impossible for so many non GamStop casinos, like casinoways, to be successful. It’s therefore important to play at established and financially strong casinos without GamStop where you don’t have to worry about getting your money even if you make large payouts. We only recommend these.
We also pay attention to whether a casino has a license. It doesn’t matter whether the license is from Malta, Gibraltar, Alderney, or England. All of these licenses are valuable.
How Do Non GamStop Casinos Make Profits?
The question is pressing: If nobody manipulates slots, how do casinos make profits from them? The answer is simple: games of chance are designed in such a way that, in the long run, they pay out less than they take in bets.
To do this, let’s imagine a simple game: you give me 1 euro and flip a coin. If it’s headed, I give you 1.50 euros – if it’s tails, I give you nothing. So I won 0.50 euros or 1 euro each time. You, on the other hand, might be lucky and win a few rounds in a row, but in the long run, the advantage is mine: the coin is fair, but the ratio of stake to payout is not.
Professional slot machine games follow this principle, but their process is much more complicated. The mathematics of such a game is based on four aspects:
- The number of symbols on the reels
- Winning sizes in the payout table
- Rules and probabilities for each bonus amount
- Value of each bonus amount
Game designers set these aspects for each game in such a way that, if the odds are fair, the casino has an advantage. This is how it makes a profit.
Win Rate & Volatility
Winning rate and volatility are the most important parameters of a game of chance.
Simply put, they influence how much and how often you win. In detail, the relationships between volatilities and winning rates are more complicated. I will try to give a clear explanation below.
Winning Rate
The winning rate of a game can also be called the payout ratio or percentage. It is the long-term statistical ratio between the sum of all winnings and the sum of all bets. The term long-term statistical ratio sounds a bit complicated. An example explains this matter more easily:
A win rate of around 96 percent, for example, means that with a total stake of 1,000,000 euros and 1,000,000 game rounds of 1 euro each, you will have a total winnings of around 960,000 euros after the last round.
If, on the other hand, you only play a few hundred rounds, your total winnings will be between 30 percent and 1,000 percent of your total stake. The variance of the game after this number of rounds is the difference between the two percentages.
The more rounds you play, the more likely your total winnings will be close to the long-term winning odds. The first example uses 1,000,000 rounds. Theoretically, then, after an infinite number of rounds, you will be exactly at the odds – with zero variance.
The most common long-term win rate for online games is around 96 percent. Some games, such as Vegas Diamonds, even offer up to 98 percent.
The long-term winning rate of a game of chance is a very popular indicator because it is easy to understand and is easy to remember as a single number for the respective game. This also gives players a good comparison of different games. Most distributors of popular games also disclose their winning rates. This also makes it possible to write typical overview articles on the most profitable games of chance.
Odds also help players to make various quick calculations. For example, they can quickly determine the approximate loss on a bonus due to the requirement to place multiple bets before the bonus is paid out.
Volatility
Quick calculations like those for bonus loss might impress friends over cocktails to celebrate your big win. But particularly informative calculations also include volatilities.
The volatility of a particular action in a particular game of chance is not easy to determine, which is why we will first look at an example. Roulette is a great example of this:
If you bet on color as your action, you can win twice your stake, and you will win very often in the long run, namely in 18 out of 37 rounds. If, on the other hand, you bet on a single number, you will win 36 times your stake – but in the long run, you will only win in one out of 37 rounds.
This means that the volatility of a roulette action can easily be expressed using values between 2 and 37. In general, the volatility of your action indicates the level of risk you take with this action – in terms of potential winnings and their frequency. The betting nature of a game of chance means that a higher win occurs less often.
High volatility of an action type, such as “betting on only one number,” means that you have a high probability of losing with an action of this type but that your bankroll will increase dramatically if you win.
The volatilities of many games of chance cannot be easily expressed as single numbers. For example, thousands of individual winning amounts often result from the many different combinations of winning circumstances.
Calculating Complex Volatilities
Because a single number does not adequately define the volatile nature of a more complex game of chance, most distributors label one of their games as low, average, or very volatile. However, this does not really allow games to be compared. In addition, this does not allow you to make reliable, quick calculations during a game round. However, you do at least have a rough idea of the nature of the game in question.
Calculating the volatility of a more complex slot game remains a very difficult task. You have to simulate the interaction of all the reels and calculate or at least estimate the probabilities of all types of events. This requires long-term testing of the game. Even with complete knowledge of all the details, for example as a developer of the game, the calculation will probably take at least several days.
However, slot machine volatilities can be roughly estimated based on the paytable and the behavior of the wheels. To do this, concentrate on the feature combination with the highest win: How likely are you to hit it?