Professional Slots Player (Can You Profit from Slot Machines?)

I’ve met some strange and interesting characters while gambling. But I’ve never met anyone who claims to be a professional slots player.

This post is all about debunking the idea of playing slot machines professionally.

I’m not just going to share my personal opinions; there will be a little bit of math along the way.

Learning why professional slots players don’t exist can help you understand slot machine play in general.

Also, be sure to check out my new post comparing Bovada versus Betonline.

Do Professional Slots Players Exist?

Are there people who make a living playing slot machines?

I got inspired to write this post after reading over the 7 Secrets of Professional Lottery Players.

The short answer to the question is: “No.”

Slots are designed to return less money than they take in. Over time, you’ll lose to the house, because the games are programmed to give the casino an advantage. There’s no legal way to gain an edge against the house while playing slot machines.

But, in a weird way that I’ll dig deeper into further down in the post, yes. Some people do (sort of) make a living playing slots.

But let’s start out with a brutal truth for people who think they can play slots professionally:

It is not possible to be a professional slots player.

At least, not in the way that you’re thinking.

The old adage that “the house always wins” is never truer true than when you’re playing slots.

The Basics of Slot Machine Odds

Slot machines are programmed to return a specific percentage of all money played into them over time. This information is known as the “return to player” or RTP. Game designers post slot RTPs on their websites, though casinos often tailor the games RTP programming to suit their needs.

In places like Las Vegas, you can look up average RTP figures by denomination and get some sense of which games offer the best odds.

But even the best-odds slots are keeping a significant portion of each bet thanks to game odds stacked against the player.

The best-odds slot machines on the Vegas Strip (as of the time of this post) still give the house a pretty significant edge against players. The $5 slots on the Strip have an average return of 94.15%. That means you’re giving the house about $0.30 on every spin. That’s an hourly cost of about $120 to play a slot machine.

Consider the hourly cost of a penny slot machine on the Strip. The average penny slot at the time of this post pays out at around 88.5%. The casino is keeping more than a dime of every dollar you bet on a $0.01 slot machine.

There’s no slot machine in America that pays out anywhere near 100%. Obviously, there’s not a slot game that pays out above 100% – the casino hosting it would lose a lot of money and shut the game down pretty quickly.

Games like blackjack and video poker can be played with skill to a point where the house is at a (slight) disadvantage. That’s why some people earn a kind of living playing those games.

Slots aren’t that kind of game. You can’t gain an edge playing slots. That’s why you can’t be a pro slots player.

What Is a Professional Slots Player?

To explain why professional slots players don’t exist, let’s start by defining what would make someone a professional.

My Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “professional” in part as: “a person engaged in a specific activity as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.”

To be a professional fishing guide, you need to derive your living mainly from helping fishermen locate and land fish. To be a professional wedding planner, the bulk of your income should be from helping people plan their weddings.

So, it makes sense that a pro slots player would need to derive the bulk of their income from slot machines.

Pro Slots Player Example

It’s a good idea to imagine what a pro slot machine player would look like.

Imagine a slots gambler living in Tunica, Mississippi that wants to go pro. He’s married with one kid. He has easy access to lots of different slots games thanks to the local casino industry. How much does he need to earn from slots to pay his rent and bills?

According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a family living in Mississippi made up of two adults and one child (with only one adult working) requires a wage of at least $30.25 an hour. Anything lower than $10.57 an hour is considered a poverty wage. That’s interesting, considering $7.25 is the minimum wage in the state.

Our gambler needs to earn $1,210 per week playing slots in order to meet MIT’s definition of a “living wage” in Mississippi. If he earns less than $423 a week, his family will technically be living in poverty.

Based on the most recent revenue reports for Mississippi’s Northern district, our gambler would be facing the following average RTPs in Tunica’s casinos:

• penny slots: 90.99%
• nickel slots: 94.63%
• fifty-cent slots: 93.19%
• multi-denomination: 93.44%

Obviously, he should fixate on those nickel slots. They give him the best odds against the house of all the denominations listed.

Unfortunately, he’ll never be able to overcome the casino’s edge.

If he’s playing multiple hours a day most days of the week, he’s headed straight into the casino’s profit grinder.

He might occasionally get lucky and hit a big jackpot, but it won’t be sustainable.

In order to end with a bankroll of $1,210 for a given week, he’d have to start with a bankroll of $1,275. That doesn’t make any sense.

Our made-up gambler is technically losing money by playing slots professionally.

How to Win Lots of Money Playing Slots

I’ve got a few common sense tips to help people win lots of money playing slots.

The 3 tips here won’t guarantee big winnings or help you become a slot-playing professional, but they might help you hit those big payouts you’re looking for.

#1 – Find the slots with the lowest RTP and play those.

This makes sense. Using available statistics, look up the slot denomination that’s paying out the best, and then stick to those machines.

This won’t guarantee a profit, but it could help you avoid some losses relative to playing other games.

Some problems with this plan exist. You may not have much choice, since it’s common for the best-odds games to also be the most limited. Another issue – not everyone has the kind of bankroll for sustained play on the best slot machines.

For example, in Mississippi, the best-odds games at the time of this post are the $100 slots in the high-limit sections of various Tunica casinos. These games have an average RTP of 95.47%. At 400 spins an hour, you’re looking at an hourly cost north of $1,800. If you have the kind of money to sustain that, I say go for it.

Most people don’t have the cash to play $100 per credit slots.

#2 – Play progressive slots and get (really) lucky.

Progressive slots have the biggest jackpots of any slot game. These linked slot games shave off a tiny piece of every bet placed on them (sometimes across thousands of slot games) to produce a progressive jackpot that’s often in the millions of dollars.

If you play a progressive slot and get really, really lucky, you could be in for a huge payday.

The world’s biggest slot machine payouts are all on progressive slot games. A $100 Megabucks slot machine in Vegas paid out more than $39 million for a single spin. Megabucks is a progressive game, in fact it’s probably the best-known such game.

Your odds of hitting a Megabucks progressive jackpot are something like 1 in 50 million. Considering the odds of hitting the Powerball are closer to 1 in 300 million, a progressive jackpot slot isn’t a bad deal relative to other big life-changing payouts.

#3 – Use your gambling to launch a YouTube or other social media channel.

This is it – the one way to play slots professionally that I alluded to earlier in this post.

There’s a growing population of slot machine social media influencers. These people have managed to turn a few trips to the casino each week into a kind of business.

And they’re gaining in popularity.

If you can find a way to spin your slot play into profits unrelated to that actual play, then overcoming the casino’s edge isn’t really an issue.

If video game influencers can make thousands of dollars per month playing CoD or whatever, there’s no reason you can’t label yourself a slots influencer, open a Patreon account and a YT channel, and turn your $500 a week slots habit into a profitable enterprise.

Conclusion

Okay, so you can’t make a living playing slots in the casino.

No casino is going to offer a slot machine that you can game into guaranteed profits.

That’s no reason to avoid slot machine gambling.

If you want to make guaranteed income from slots, you’ll need to think a little outside the box.

The existence of gambling influencers is proof that people like to watch people playing slots. Put your mind to it and you can have people subsidizing your slot play in no time.