Online Slot Machines: Reels and Symbols

Today’s online slots are a direct descendant of the original mechanical slot machines—the legendary one-armed bandits—embellished with a century’s worth of technical advances and incredible design innovations.

The basic component of any slot machine is the Reel. It is the reels that spin around and set the whole slots game into action. The first slot machines had three reels, and three-reel online slots can still be found at Fair Go, but most of our slots now have five reels and we even have a few—The Big Bopper among them—that have advanced to six reels.

The Symbols on the reels are no longer limited to lemons and cherries but cover an infinite range of themes. A game with an underwater theme like Megaquarium, for example, has beautifully rendered symbols of various kinds of fish and crabs and coral and seashells, while other games have equally beautiful symbols revolving around their particular themes: themes that can run from ancient Egypt to football to romance to futuristic space travel. There is really no limit to where the talents and imaginations of our game designers will take us.

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How to Play Pokies Online

The first step in playing pokies online is to choose your pokies game. This is actually the most difficult step, since Fair Go has so many terrific games to choose from, but it becomes manageable if you bear in mind that you will have plenty of opportunity to try other games in the future, so just pick one for now and go for it.

Next you place your bet. Depending on your particular game, this could involve several components, such as picking the number of lines to play and the amount to bet per line in order to arrive at your total bet for the spin. In any event, you only have to perform this step once and then you can let your bet remain constant for the remainder of your playing session.

Now comes the funnest part: spinning the reels. In the old days, you had to pull a heavy iron lever—the one-armed bandit. With today’s online slots, you just click the Spin button and the action starts. The reels spin around, you cross your fingers, you hold your breath, and eventually, the reels stop spinning. The final position of the symbols on the reels when they come to rest will determine whether, and how much, you win at slots.

How to Win at Pokies Online

Most online pokies rely on paylines to determine the winning spins. These are lines that run across all the reels on the pokies machine. They can be horizontal, diagonal, or zig-zag, and a pokies machine can have any number of paylines. Sevens & Stripes has one payline; Crystal Waters has 20; Lucky Tiger has 88. In any event, the goal is to get matching symbols on a payline, starting at the far left and continuing on adjacent reels along the payline. Which particular symbol you got, and how many of them, will determine how much you won. Every online slots game has a Paytable that tells you all the winning combinations and their payouts.

Some online pokies machines eschew paylines altogether and have All Ways Pays instead. With All Ways Pays, you win whenever you get matching symbols on adjacent reels starting on the left; it doesn’t matter where exactly on the reels the symbols fall. All Ways Pays gives you 243 ways to win in Asgard, 1024 ways in Panda Magic, and 3125 ways in Mermaid’s Pearls.

Scatter Symbols are another way to win at pokies online. These are special symbols that don’t have to appear on a payline or on adjacent reels; just get three or more of the same Scatter Symbol scattered anywhere on the machine and you win a payout.

How Much Can You Win?

How much you can win is the all-important question, and the answer is A LOT. Every game and every Paytable is different, but Five White Diamond symbols in Diamond Dozen online slots pays 3,000 times your line bet, five Explorer symbols in Polar Explorer pays 5,000 times, five Santa symbols in Naughty or Nice pays 10,000 times, so you get the idea. A lot.

And you can win even more if you play Progressive Jackpot Games like Aztec’s Millions and Megasaur. These are online slots games with a top jackpot that grows every time somebody plays the game anywhere in the world, enabling you to win hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars on one lucky spin of the reels. Now wouldn’t that be grand?

Have fun and good luck playing pokies online at Fair Go Online Casino and open your account today!

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