Spend any time at all looking up online slots strategy and you're going to find out about the importance of payout percentages. The basic piece of advice given here is to find slots games with the highest payout percentages because they'll offer the most return on your bets. For example, a 98% payback game would be better than a 95% game since you're getting $0.98 back on every $1 wagered. However, there's more to consider with this subject, which is why we're going to discuss it further.

The Cost of Higher Payouts 

Before you spend all of your time searching for 98% payback games, it's important to understand that you're going to be paying more for this high payout percentage. Getting into the specifics, this high of a payback amount is typically only offered with the bigger progressive slots. And to achieve the top payout percentage, you need to make the maximum spins because you won't be eligible for the jackpot otherwise.

For example, if you were playing a big progressive slots game with a 97% payout percentage, you might have to make a maximum spin of $1 every time to quality for the jackpot/top payback. Contrast this to some non-progressive, quarter slots game where betting $0.25 will put you in line for 94% payback. Obviously 97% initially looks better, but you also have to consider the higher spin costs associated with this game.

Focusing on the Long-term

Continuing on with our discussion of the dollar and quarter slots, let's assume that somebody makes one thousand spins on both games. Here's the math on these two different scenarios:

$1 slots (97% payback) - 1,000 spins x $1 x $0.03 (average loss) = $30 lost
$0.25 slots (94% payback) - 1,000 spins x $0.25 x $0.06 (average loss) = $15

As you can see from the above figure, the payout percentage is less for the quarter slots game. However, your expected loss is only half of what you'd expect to lose with the dollar slots game. The reason why is because the lower spin costs more than makes up for the lower payback. So always keep this in mind when looking at online slots payout percentages.