The one and only purpose of a slot machine is to take your money.
What’s worse is that they are carefully designed with their flashing lights and sound effects to get your dopamine receptors firing and create an addiction.
They even openly advertise the fact that they take your money on the machines with little stickers which tell you something along the lines of “The average return from the machine per £100 is £85.00.”
You would think with this information clearly evident that avoiding playing slot machines would be a no brainer.
Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case with more and more money being spent on slot machines online and offline year after year.
I would argue that this increase in slot spending is linked to the every increasing desensitization of peoples dopamine receptors due to having instant access to media and entertainment 24/7 but that’s a topic for a whole other article.
Why you should play slots (and more importantly when!)
After everything I’ve just said you may be surprised to hear that I regularly play slots and I recommend that you do too.
Of course I don’t play them in the way that most people do. I only play the slots when I have an edge.
Bookmakers are regularly offering slot bonuses to their customers to encourage them to play the slots more often.
These bonus offers can be used to push the odds in our favour and because all slots are legally obliged to disclose their house edge, we can calculate what specific offers will make the slots worth playing.
You should be able to find the slots edge either on the bookmakers website, however, if you cannot find it there you can check out this useful website which covers the majority of the slots you will come across.
Bookmakers love to hand out slot bonus offers to new customers but you may be surprised how many of these offers are actually available to existing customers.
When doing these offers you should always read the terms and conditions carefully. Especially the part relating to rollover requirements.
Some offers have will have a 1x rollover requirement. Others may have a 100x rollover requirement.
The greater the rollover requirement the less likely the odds are to be in your favour. Generally anything with a rollover requirement of 10x or lower is worth doing.
The calculations
There are various different types of slot offers but the basic way of working out if one is worth your while is as follows.
Let’s say for example the bookmaker is offering a bonus of £10.00.
You would take the £10 bonus, multiply it by the offers rollover requirement. In this example we will make the rollover requirement x10.
£10 x 10 means you need to stake a total of £100 to redeem the bonus.
Let’s also say the slot you are playing has a 4% house edge. You would take 4% of £110 to calculate you qualifying losses.
The qualifying losses in this example would be £4.00. (4% of £100)
You would then take your qualifying losses of £4.00 from your initial bonus of £10 to calculate that the average profit from this offer.
In this case it would be £6.00. (£10-£4)
Of course you won’t make £6 every time you do an offer like this. Sometimes you’ll make nothing, other times you might make £50. But it will all average out to a profit of £6 per offer in the long run.
So how do you find these offers?
You could check through the bonus promotions pages of various gambling sites regularly and check your inbox for any promotions you have been sent.
That would be a lot of work for little reward though. (these offers often only last a couple of days so you could easily miss them)
Alternatively you could sign up for Profit Maximiser where promotions such as these are posted on a daily calender along with various other low risk offers which will also make you money.
A membership to the Profit Maximiser group will cost you £116.40 per year. This money can easily be made back within a week by completing the offers available each day via the calender.
What’s more, Profit Maxismiser include instructions with all the offers informing you of any rollover requirements and detailed instructions on how to complete the offer.
You probably aren’t going to get rich from Profit Maximiser (although one of the members was lucky enough to win £100,000.00 from one offer) but I usually make a few hundred quid each month from it with fairly minimal effort which is nothing to be sniffed at.
Some of the more serious users of the service claim they can make around a couple grand a month from it and I don’t doubt it.