As many slots players know, each game has a payback figure. Sometimes this figure is 90%, sometimes it’s 94%, sometimes it’s only 88%. The key is that if you play long enough, you’re going to hit the average payback amount. But just how many spins will it take to reach this figure?
If you want to know exactly how many spins it would take you to hit the payout percentage of a slots game, you’d need a PAR sheet. These show how many times every winning combination hits, allowing you to calculate an approximate answer on when you’d reach the payback figure. Here’s a generic example…
Let’s say you perform 1,000 spins on a game, and, through some calculations, the PAR sheet reveals that your payback would probably be between 63% and 133%. Obviously this is a pretty wide range and won’t really reflect the listed payout percentage very well.
So let’s look at 10,000 spins, to which the PAR sheet might help you determine that your payback would be between 85% and 109%. Bumping up to 100,000 spins, your PAR sheet may lead to between 93% and 100% payback. At 1 million spins, this figure might narrow to between 94% and 95%.
The example I showed would be a volatile, 5-reel game, and it would take less spins to get an accurate estimate on a classic 3-reeler. But the point is that it definitely requires lots of spins before you’re even close to the listed payback amount.
Given that most players never reach 1 million or more spins on a single game, they will be dealing with more-random chance, which is really what slots is all about. But if you really want to know, try obtaining the PAR sheet for a specific game and start doing calculations based on the frequency of winning combinations.