(Image: https://burst.shopifycdn.com/photos/santa-shopping-for-sales.jpg?width=746&format=pjpg&exif=0&iptc=0)A great deal has been written about the honesty of land-based slot machines. A good article by Steve Bourie is titled, “Are Slot Machines Honest?” and originally appeared in the 1999 American Casino Guide. (It can be found online by searching for the title in Google or Yahoo!.) Physical, land-based slot machines have a whole lot of “variations” (being polite) than can deceive the player. Simply, they are all illegal and don't happen. But read the article, closely.
At the same time, online casino slots use an electronic “random number generator” or RNG, operating inside an extremely large computer program that manages the game graphics, the player accounts of individuals that join the game, the statistics of every hand played, plus much more. The random number generator is hard-coded software instructions that do not change. There is no “sense switch” (see the Bourie article) that can be flipped to give players worse odds. Regarding control parameters, each utilization of the RNG is the same as the final use, and also will be the same as the next use. The numbers will come out randomly, however the pattern of randomness never changes. This really is a true advantage of software-based online casino slots.
Land-based slot machines can also have payout percentages as low as 83%, which is just not true with online casino slots. In online gaming, each machine has the exact same winning percentage as the additional machines. You can see the payout percentages for many online gaming sites, and also you will see that it rarely drops below 95% - that is, the house makes a 5% profit, on the common. In reality, most casinos can document that their payout percentages are within the 97% - 98% range. It means that you can spend an hour, gamble your $100 stake about 3 times, and also on the standard it will cost you $7.50. But players don't gamble to be average: the true reward is the well-paying win. And also the high-paying win is balanced, remember, by a range of players who lose and finance that win.
So are online casino slots fair? Yes, they clearly are. The software that operates the games is tested regularly by independent testing laboratories (look these up for logos at the bottom of the casino website), and no game is individually controllable to be biased. Which is a far cry from the situation with land-based slot machines, appropriately called “one-armed bandits”.
Players improve odds, they get absolute consistency across all games - but nobody can guarantee a win every time. That is just the nature of gambling, and that is a division of the thrill.