Does the amount you bet impact the chances of winning?

The short answer to this question is no – the amount of money that you bet does not impact your chances of winning, either small or big. But it’s a little more complicated than this.

For starters, the amount of rows you bet on does impact your chances of winning. This is pretty obvious when you think about it. If you only have one row activated, then it is only the symbols that appear on that row that count when tallying your winnings (if any). In order to win any amount, you need a certain combination to appear on all three (or five, or another number depending on the machines you’re playing on) reels in a row.

If you’re playing with more rows activated, then your chances increase as you need the same amount of symbols, but there are more places for them to appear. It costs more money to play with more rows, so in this sense, you could argue that the amount you play with in fact does increase your chances of winning.

There’s another factor involved in assessing whether the amount you bet impacts your chances of winning, and that’s jackpots. The amount you bet does not alter your chances of winning the jackpot. However, and this is a big however, if you do win the jackpot, the amount you bet greatly impacts on the amount you win. If you are betting the maximum and then you hit the jackpot, you will win the maximum jackpot – that is the amount advertised as the jackpot by the machine. This amount depends on the machine you are playing, but could be more than a million dollars. If you are not betting the maximum amount and you hit the jackpot, the amount you win will be greatly reduced. It could decrease from a million dollars to ten thousand dollars, even if you are betting only a dollar or two less than the maximum bet amount allowed. You’ll obviously still be pretty happy if you’re taking home ten or twenty thousand dollars. But knowing you could have been taking home a million dollars or more, and that you were only a dollar or two away – that’s going to take some of your excitement away, and that dollar or two is going to seem pretty insignificant.

Do keep in mind that although that dollar or two seems insignificant after you could have won a million dollars, that doesn’t make it insignificant, and if you’re betting the maximum all the time, your bankroll is going to diminish pretty rapidly – thereby limiting how many plays you can make and lowering your overall chances of getting the jackpot to begin with. It’s all a matter of balance!