Advantage Slots

This is another game grinders love and for good reason. For this one, we’re looking for locked yellow portals, mostly in the second and third columns, but be sure to only check the bottom row of bets:

It may be a little hard to read, but the bets on the bottom row — $1, $2, $3, $4, $5 — have the words “portal lock” underneath them. The bets on the top row — $0.60, $1.20, $1.80, $2.40, $3.00 — don’t. Why does that matter? Well, those circular portals don’t stick around from spin to spin if you’re making bets on the top row, so there can never be an advantage for the player.

Here’s that section enlarged: 

Now that we have the boring stuff out of the way, what’s a minimum play? Well, it’s not always so black and white, due to some fringe cases, but generally, you want at least three yellow portals in the second and third columns, such as in the first example above, which I’d classify as a bare-minimum play.

Once you really start understanding slots, things will click, as it’s the same reason that bubbles in Ocean Magic Grand aren’t that desirable in the first column by themselves. In this game, meteors rain down from the sky on random spins and when they hit a locked portal, those portals expand and make the surrounding spaces wild.

But if a portal in the first column is hit, you’ll lose the expansion on the left side, because there’s no board for the wilds to expand to. For that reason, the most desirable spots for portals are the middle of the second and third columns.

Take a look at another close example below:

I’m not doing handstands over this, but I’d play it; there are three portals in the second and third columns and better yet, we have two portals in the middle section of those columns. You can ignore the wild in column four; that’s just a vestige of a previous spin and not a portal. If a meteor hits either of those two portals, we don’t lose any expansion on the ends of the board.

Of course, sometimes you’ll find or build to near-can’t-miss plays like this:

You’d play that without hesitation until a meteor hits one of the portals. But how about something like this?

That Wu Dragon might look intoxicating, but think again. The portals were hit the previous spin and all that’s actually left are two portals if you look closely (top of reel two and middle of reel three). And that wouldn’t be enough for us to play.

Because this game isn’t so obvious, below are two more possibly tricky examples to go over:

We have four locked portals, but they’re all in column one, so I’m not interested.

How about this next one?

This is a trick question.

As you can see, we’re on the first row of the game, so none of these portals will even lock and be there the next spin. But even if we’re on the bottom row, I’m not interested. There’s some hypothetical potential with two of the portals in the middle section of the board, but column one and four aren’t that desirable with so few portals.

I have three videos available for these games: