Reading Slots Paytables

While many experienced slots players have no trouble understanding the different payouts and bonuses available, slots paytables might look like a foreign language to new players. And while this won’t prevent you from playing slots, the game is a lot more fun when you actually know what’s going on. This being said, here is a quick look at what you need to know about slots paytables.

Every online slots game provides some kind of paytable so that you can see how much every symbol is worth; to access the paytable, you’ll need to click on the provided Help or Paytable button. Once you’ve selected this option, you will be able to see all of the different symbols and corresponding payouts. However, it’s also important to note that this is where a lot of slots beginners get confused, which is where the rest of the information comes into play.

Most slots games today feature the option to play multiple paylines on one spin, which offers more chances for people to win. Unfortunately, this creates utter confusion for inexperienced players because not all of the winning combinations are straight across due to the number of paylines that need to fit into a small space. For example, if you played four paylines on one spin, the fourth winning combination might appear in a V-shape on the reels. In any case, a paytable should show the different ways that winning combinations can be formed when you play extra paylines.

Regular payouts should be fairly obvious for most players, so we’ll keep this brief. A slots paytable will show how much money you’ll win for getting a certain amount of symbols on one payline. For example, if you got three Stars on one payline, you’d get 20 coins, while four Stars would earn you 50 coins, and five Stars in a single payline would get you 500 coins. The rarer a symbol is on the paylines, the more money you’ll get through a regular payout (depending on the number of symbols of course).

If you play 5 reel slots games, you’re likely to see scatter symbols offered. Sometimes confused with multipliers, scatter symbols differ in that they multiply the entire bet, rather than just a winning combination. For example, if the right amount of scatter symbols showed up on the reels and you bet $0.05 on 20 paylines ($1.00 total), the scatter symbols would multiply your $1 total bet. In most cases, you need anywhere from 3-5 scatter symbols to multiply winning bets; for example, three symbols would multiply wins by 3, four symbols would multiply wins by 20, and five symbols would multiply wins by 200.

Sometimes slots games feature both a substitute and scatter symbol. Substitutes are far different from scatter symbols though because they must appear in a winning combination, rather than just anywhere on the slots reels. If a substitute symbol does appear in a winning combination, it usually doubles the prize of the combo. It’s also worth mentioning that if scatter symbols and substitutes appear in the same combination, the scatter symbol will override the substitute.

These symbols are always popular because they can substitute for other symbols to create a winning combination. So if a Moon symbol was wild, and you got this along with two Stars in a payline, you would then have three Stars and a payout. Wild symbols often trigger the jackpot in slots games when five of them appear on one payline. But with this being the case, you rarely see five wild symbols on one payline.

These are a little easier to understand than scatter symbols since they usually only multiply a single winning combination. For example, if you got a 5X multiplier in the same payline where you had a 10-coin winning combination, you’d now have a 50-coin payout. In many cases, multipliers also complete winning combinations, so they’re like a better version of a wild symbol.

The ever-popular bonus games are triggered when bonus symbols appear in certain reels. Sometimes rules get pretty specific here, such as a bonus symbol having to appear on reels 2 and 4 on a winning combination for bonus games to be triggered; other times the bonus game comes when three or more bonus symbols appear anywhere on the reels. There’s really no set way in how bonus symbols work from one game to the next, so you’d be doing yourself a favor by reading paytables closely for this information.