Welcome to the best place to play FREE online slots and video poker. Choose from 30+ totally FREE 3-reel and 5-reel slots. No installation or download needed, just. Even if they don’t have the best odds of winning, I still play slot machines and indulge in buying lottery tickets every once in a while. In fact, I’m sure most gamblers have done both at some point in their lives. But what if you had to choose? Slot machine games and lottery tickets both.
Even if they don’t have the best odds of winning, I still play slot machines and indulge in buying lottery tickets every once in a while. In fact, I’m sure most gamblers have done both at some point in their lives. But what if you had to choose?
Slot machine games and lottery tickets both offer small bet amounts and big prizes. But the lottery’s top prizes dwarf slot machine jackpots by a significant amount.
When you consider all of the facts about both the lottery and slot machines, the best option is clear. Here are five reasons why lottery games are a better option than slot machines. You have to get extremely lucky to win a big prize with either option, so why not take a shot at a huge payout?
1 – Bigger Top Prizes
Have you ever been involved in a conversation or even just overheard a conversation about a professional athlete or movie star making $20 or $30 million a year? A common thing to hear in these situations is how many millions does one person need?
If you’re living from paycheck to paycheck and are behind on your bills or don’t know how you’re going to put food on the table, it’s tempting to judge people making more money than you’re going to see in your entire life.
But the fact is that no matter what financial situation you’re in, more is always better. If you’re as poor as a church mouse, more is undoubtedly better. If you’re comfortable and have all of your bills paid and some money in savings and investments, more would still be better. And if you’re making millions, who wouldn’t say yes to a couple million more?
Real money slot machines have big top prizes. These top prizes are often $50,000 or $100,000 or higher. Progressive slots go over $1 million sometimes.
I don’t know anyone that couldn’t find something to do with an extra $50,000.
Slot Machine Statistics Better Than Lotto Ez2
All of this is simply to point out that slot machines offer some great top prizes. But the slot machine with the biggest top prize isn’t even close to the top prize offered on some lottery games.
Big lottery draws for Powerball and Mega Millions start in the tens of millions and frequently climb to the hundreds of millions.
How many millions do you need? Winning $1 million or more is going to have a big impact on your life. It doesn’t matter if you win playing slot machines or the lottery. But when you’re looking for the biggest to prize amount, the lottery is clearly a better choice than slot machines.
2 – Less Expensive to Play
You can find slot machines that allow you to bet a quarter a spin. And these machines are plentiful. You can also find slot machines that have larger wagers, with $1, $2, and $3 machines becoming more common. You can even play high-limit slot machines at $5 and higher per spin.
Lottery tickets also offer a wide range, with a ticket to Mega Millions or Powerball costing $2 or $3, depending on whether you spend the extra $1. You can buy scratch-off and daily tickets for as low as $1 in most states.
You might be wondering how I can claim that it’s less expensive to play the lottery than slot machines if you can play slots for .25 and it costs at least $1 to buy a lottery ticket. Well, if you just played one spin with slots and you just bought one lottery ticket, it would be the same. But this isn’t how most gamblers play slot machines. Most don’t just spin once and leave.
Let’s say you sit down at a slot machine and bet .25 a spin, at a rate of 500 spins an hour—which is common for slots players—in just six minutes, you’re going to risk $12. That’s the same price as buying a few $1 or $2 lottery tickets for a few weeks in a row.
When was the last time that you played slots and only played for six minutes? My guess is that this has never happened. Most slots players play for at least an hour every time they play.
It’s less expensive to play the lottery than slot machines.
3 – Convenience
How far do you have to travel to get to the casino nearest to where you live? I have to travel 1 ½ hours, but many people live closer to a casino than I do. When I travel to a casino though, I probably drive by 100 or more places where I could easily buy myself a lottery ticket.
I live close to the middle of nowhere, and yet I can still get a lottery ticket and drive back home in less than 20 minutes. People who live in town can get a lottery ticket within a couple minutes. In most areas, you can buy a lottery ticket in any gas station or convenience store, and these are on every corner it seems.
You can pick up a lottery ticket on your way to work or on the way home. You can get one when you go to the grocery store or anytime you stop to get gas. It’s simply a matter of running into the gas station and asking for a ticket.
Of course, you can play online or mobile slot machines from just about anywhere now, but playing slots in a live casino is still the most popular way to play. It’s simply more convenient for most people to buy a lottery ticket than to find a slot machine.
4 – Multiple Lottery Options
You can find a wide variety of slot machines to play, but in the end, they’re really all the same thing. You make a bet, spin the reels, and hope to win. The only variety you get is when you get up and move to another machine.
The lottery has many different game options. You can play daily games like pick 4 or pick 3, play dozens of different scratch-off tickets, or take a shot at a big game like Powerball or Mega Millions.
This boils down to how you like to gamble. But from my perspective, the lottery offers more options than slot machines. I get a bit bored when I play slot machines, but I don’t get bored playing the lottery.
When I buy a Mega Millions ticket, I always figure out how much I’m going to get after taxes and spend a few minutes figuring out how I’m going to spend and invest the money. I enjoy thinking about this a great deal. And I simply don’t get this same entertainment value from watching the reels spin on a slot machine.
5 – The Dream Factor
I touched on this in the last section, but slot machines and the lotteries are two completely different types of entertainment. The way I look at the two options is that slot machines are a quick way to risk a little and hope to win a jackpot. And the lottery is investing a few dollars and enjoying the dream of winning.
You can dream about winning when you’re playing slots, but this has never given me the same level of excitement as buying a lottery ticket to a big drawing. The closest thing the lottery offers to slot machines for me is buying a scratch-off ticket.
A friend of mine put this in a way that has always stuck with me. He said that he knew he wasn’t going to win the lottery, but it was worth spending a couple dollars for the few minutes of escaping from reality that it gave him.
It’s worth a few dollars to me to dream about how $50 million could change my life and the life of my family. This is why the dream factor is better when you play the lottery than when you play slot machines. Plus, you certainly never see people lining up to play a slot machine the way you do with a million-dollar lottery prize.
Conclusion
If you had to pick either the lottery or slot machines, which way would you go? The lottery offers the chance to win more money if you get lucky, but is this worth taking a chance at the longer odds?
One thing that can’t be argued about is the cost of playing. The lottery is much cheaper to play than slot machines.
It’s also more convenient to pick up a lottery ticket than traveling to a casino to play slot machines. Lottery tickets are available everywhere, and slots are usually only found in a casino.
Finally, a lottery ticket can be a cheap way to dream about winning enough money to change your entire life.
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I spent part of last week on vacation from science in Las Vegas, where I thankfully avoided financial ruin due to some fortunate combination of genes, math awareness and a wife that has no interest in gambling. Sure, I dabbled a bit in games of chance, but as soon as I got a little bit ahead on the blackjack tables I ran for my life, knowing that the probability would even out hard in the long run. For those concerned about the financial well-being of Sin City, they still managed to turn a profit on us, thanks to the low-return temptations of fine dining and French circus acts set to Beatles megamixes. But most of our time was spent on the free entertainment of people-watching and stuff-watching, observing row after row of people almost hypnotically at work on loud, noisy slot machines amid fake New York, Paris and Venice scenery.
It doesn’t take a PhD in neurobiology to conclude that slot machines are designed to lure people into a money-draining repetition, just as it doesn’t take expertise in the casino business to realize slots are absurdly profitable – there’s a reason why they outnumber table games 100-to-1. But I wanted to go back to the scientific literature to confirm a faint glimmer of information I retained from graduate school, specifically that slot machines are masterful manipulators of our brain’s natural reward system. Every feature – the incessant noise, the flashing lights, the position of the rolls and the sound of the coins hitting the dish – is designed to hijack the parts of our brain designed for the pursuit of food and sex and turn it into a river of quarters. Or so I remember.
Fortunately, there is a robust amount of research into why slot machines are so addictive, despite paying out only about 75% of what people put in. They are, some scientists have concluded, the most addictive of all the ways humans have designed to gamble, because pathological gambling appears faster in slots players and more money is spent on the machines than other forms of gambling. In Spain, where gambling is legal and slot machines can be found in most bars, more than 20.3 billion dollars was spent on slots in 2008 – 44% of the total money spent by Spaniards on gambling last year.
That data was published earlier this month by a psychologist from the Universidad de Valencia named Mariano Choliz in the Journal of Gambling Studies. Yes, such a publication exists! In the background of the paper, Choliz outlines the tricks that slot machines use to keep people feeding them:
- Operating on a random payout schedule, but appearing to be a variable payout; i.e. fooling the player into thinking that the more money they play, the more likely they are to win.
- “The illusion of control” in pressing buttons or pulling a lever to produce the outcome.
- The “near-miss” factor (more on this below)
- Increased arousal (where the sounds and flashing lights come in)
- Able to be played with very little money; the allure of “penny” slots.
- And perhaps most importantly, immediate gratification.
This last point is the subject of Choliz’s experiment, which puts a group of ten pathological gamblers in front of two different slot machines. One machine produces a result (win or lose) 2 seconds after the coin was virtually dropped (it was computer program), the other delayed the result until 10 seconds after the gambler hit play. In support of the immediate gratification theory, gamblers played almost twice as long on the 2-second machines than they did on the 10-second machines…even though the 10-second machines paid out more money on average!
Choliz concluded that the immediacy of the reward was part of what kept people at slot machines, making them so addictive. The quick turnaround between action and reward also allows people to get into a repetitious, uninterrupted behavior, which Choliz compares to the “Skinner boxes” of operant conditioning – the specialized cages where rats hit a lever for food or some other reward. It seems like a cruel comparison, but after my three days walking through the casinos, not an inaccurate one.
Another trick up the slot machine’s sleeve was profiled earlier this year by a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge. In the journal Neuron, Luke Clark and colleagues examined the “near-miss” effect, the observation that barely missing a big payout (i.e. two cherries on the payline while the third cherry is just off) is a powerful stimulator of gambling behavior.
The Cambridge researchers put their subjects in an fMRI machine to take images of their brains while they played a two-roll slot machine game. When the players hit a match and won money, the reward systems of the brain predictably got excited – the activation of areas classically associated to respond to food or sex I mentioned earlier. When players got a “near-miss,” they reported it as a negative experience, but also reported an increased desire to play! That feeling matched up with activation of two brain areas commonly associated with drug addiction: the ventral striatum and the insula (smokers who suffer insular damage suddenly lose the desire to smoke).
Clark and co. conclude that near-misses produce an “illusion of control” in gamblers, exploiting the credo of “practice makes perfect.” If you were learning a normal task such as hitting a baseball, a “near-miss” foul ball would suggest that you’re getting closer – it’s better than a complete whiff, after all. But for a slot machine, where pulling the lever has no impact on the rolls other than to start them moving and start the internal computer calculating, a “near-miss” is as meaningless as any miss.
Nevertheless, it’s this type of “cognitive distortion,” as Clark and colleagues name it, that makes slot machines such effective manipulators of our brains. Those massive, gaudy casino-hotels that I wore out a pair of shoes strolling through last week weren’t just built on a crafty use of probability, they were built on a exploitation of brain functions we are only just beginning to understand.