Dr Catalin Barboianu PhD

How to Unlock the Secrets of PAR Sheets for Slot Mastery Slots are the most popular casino games today despite the mystery surrounding their inner design. For modern electromechanical slots or virtual-reel slots, players do not know what is behind the sparkling cases and the colourful interfaces, that is, how the machine is configured on its reels and what to expect from it. This information is not made public by the developer or the operator. Consequently, they do not know statistical information about a machine, that is, how frequent each winning combination is hit and what is the average return (with some exceptions for the latter indicator, which is exposed on some machines). This hidden information is written in the... Read More

Progressive jackpot slots significance Slots are known as casino games that do not offer players many strategic possibilities. The only available strategy is that of choosing: choosing a game or another, choosing the bet size, choosing the paylines to enable, and so on. It’s essentially like in a lottery, just that the slot game is more attractive as it is conceived and offers prizes more frequently.  This lack of strategic possibilities is true if talking about optimal strategies, which are mathematically-devised strategies proven to give the player an advantage against the house in certain circumstances. Unlike in blackjack, for example, where playing in a certain way in certain situations may increase your winning probability in the game or expectation over... Read More

RTP and its misinterpretations among slots players The game of slots is as popular among casino games as it is hard to “deconstruct” and understand in depth.  If one wants to analyse a slot game statistically to reveal its parameters, they have no at-hand means for doing that, just because its producers keep the game’s design secret. We can see in the pay window the payout odds of the game, but we don’t even know how many stops each reel has and how many symbols of each kind are placed on each reel; in the absence of this information, one cannot know the probability of each winning combination and thus cannot further compute other statistical indicators either. And yet one... Read More

Why are there so many versions of slots and what do they have in common? Over the last two decades, slots became one of the most popular and the most played casino game. There are thousands of slot games on the casino market, with different designs, themes, reels, symbols, rules, payout schedules and prizes. Big slots producers develop new slot games every year, as result of the work of their designers, mathematicians, and market analysts. This diversity has of course marketing reasons, as people always like to choose among various products for those that best fit their preferences, but also their style of playing and personal criteria of gambling. In this article, we shall see how slot design allows such... Read More