How the Payout Schedule Determines Your Chances of Winning

The payout schedule and general structure of the way the wins are distributed in a pokie create different types of situations in terms of the volatility or variance of a game. Here's a good example to give you an intuitive feel of what we mean by this. Suppose we flip a fair coin and you get $3 for heads and you lose $1 on tails. On average, you're going to win $1 for every time you play this game. The expected value is $1, and your variance is pretty low since you won't have particularly long winning or losing streaks.

However, imagine what happens if you're playing with a fair, six-sided die such that you'll win $11 when you roll a six, and you'll lose $1 on all other rolls. You'll still win an average of $1 per roll on this new game, but the variance is going to be much higher than with the coin flipping game. This is the same way that bigger jackpots influence pokies because it takes away from value on the low and medium payouts that keep your balance afloat over the longer run.

With games that have big jackpots, especially progressive jackpot games that are extremely popular these days, you're going to have a higher volatility than usual. The adjustment you need to make for this is to use smaller bet sizes than you typically would. However, it's not always easy to know what the volatility of a game is, and that's why you should check with a trusted resource like Grizzly Gambling to find out everything you know about pokies by checking out their free play games and reading detailed reviews that tell you all of the information you need to make an informed decision.

Something that makes it easier to make informed decisions is trying out games for free play rounds before you play for real money. If you're interested in doing this, then visit the site now and check out their selection of the hottest titles available in the pokies industry. When you try these titles out for free money, you get a better idea of what you're getting yourself into, and it makes it easier to plan ahead and understand what the swings are going to be like.

You also get a host of information about the pokies that you're interested in all in one place. Normally it's hard to find statistics about the volatility and other factors that a game has that aren't published within the game itself. Instead, Grizzly Gambling allows you to read off things like the volatility of a game that you're interested so that you can decide how to play it in terms of bankroll management and other aspects of strategy.