Almost every online casino you visit has a payout percentage over 90%. This sounds pretty good compared to the mandated 75% in some physical casinos! But have you ever wondered where that 90% has gone? Certainly, not everybody who logs into their online pokies account to play with $100 walks out with $90. So what’s the story, morning glory? Firstly, you should calculate your own payout percentages for your online pokies investment. Then keep reading, to find out why your payout percentages probably don’t match up with the online pokies venue’s published statistics!
How to Calculate Your Own Payout Percentages
The actual mathematical process to calculate your own payout percentages is simple. You can actually get quite detailed statistics and overall information on your online pokies playing, by creating a spreadsheet which records:
- How much money you put into a particular online pokies game
- How much you won in the course of the game
- How much you had when you cashed out
- How many winning spins you made
- How many times the bonus or special features of that game were activated
- How many free spins a machine gave you
- How many times a wild card appeared
- How many times high-paying symbols in the online pokies game appeared, when they were and were not in a payline
The only two columns that are used to calculate your payout percentage are the first two: how much you put into a particular online pokies game, and how much you were paid out.
Simply divide the amount that you won during the course of the game, by the amount of money you bet. This is your payout percentage!
What do you need all the other information for? If you play the same online pokies for long enough to notice a general trend, you may start to notice which machines pay out slightly more than others, and which suit your style of play. For example, you might see an online polies game which pays out a 1:1 return more frequently than others, which suits your style of play because you like to utilise the ‘Gamble’ feature on a machine.
Why Doesn’t My Payout Percentage Match the Published Rate?
It will be a rare event that you payout percentage will match the published rate, even if your casino is audited frequently by an online pokies industry accreditor like eCOGRA.
The main reason for this is simply that most people do not play online pokies for long enough to have a representative sample for their statistics.
The base idea that keeps everybody coming back to online pokies goes something like this:
- The machine pays out less money ON AVERAGE than people put into it (so that the online pokies game host can profit and stay in business)
- Each spin may return more or less than we put in
- But we hope that when WE are playing the machine happens to be when it returns more than we put in!
It would be incredibly boring to watch your dollars disappearing, 10c at a time, without any hope of winning more than you put in. In fact, it isn’t a viable business model! That’s why it is likely that your personal payout percentage for an online pokies game will be either more or less than the published rate – you have either won big, or subsidised other people’s big wins!
Should I Play at Casinos With Higher Payout Rates?
It depends how much cash you plan to spend at a particular online casino. If you are a casual player who’ll only be playing for a short period of time, your results will be governed more by chance than by the online pokies’ payout percentage.
If you’re a regular player, a few percentage points’ difference in payout rates may make a difference to you in the long run. Additionally, if you’re a regular player, you’ll be able to accurately identify the online pokies that are most likely to pay up for your play style. This is a big advantage – but only available when you do your own payout percentage analysis, as shown above!
$7,159,773
$1,502,157
$5,288,206