Advantage Slots

Here’s the simple, most-of-the-time-is-right answer: 4,500 ways or more. Remember, “ways” is the small number on the bottom left corner of the screen:

The goal is often not to reach the end of the columns and the prize that comes with it. In the example above, you can see it’s a $2.40 bet, we have 5,040 ways, and the tops of the columns are as follows from left to right: bonus, $24, $437.55, $30, $39.

Spinning horseshoes, like you can see in column four, will increase the length of the column by one space usually (occasionally two or three). But the money isn’t made in hitting, say, $24 or $30 or $39 on a $2.40 bet. In fact, once you reach the top of a column, you’re awarded that prize and the column resets from eight spaces high back to three, significantly decreasing the number of total ways for the board.

The real money is made in big line hits and bonuses, which are much more likely to come when the number of ways — that number in the bottom left corner — is high. And as noted above, having 4,500 or higher ways will be a play probably 90% of the time. But we’ll go over some exceptions shortly.

This is a game where you could be just about drawing dead, lighting your money on fire, when the number of ways is really low. Conversely, when you build the play to something like this, each spin returns multiple times your bet on average:

You’ll rarely walk up on a play like that (18,816 ways). That’s just to demonstrate how amazing the board can get at certain points and how you’re printing money when you get to this point in the play.

As you’d expect with how big the middle prize is relative to the others on each bet, the middle moves the slowest. And when I say slowest, I mean glacially slow. In fact, you can’t actively chase just the middle column alone unless it’s six spaces or more up, which you’ll rarely find these days because grinders love this game as much as I do. In the example above, the middle is seven places high.

Below is what a six-up middle looks like:

This is an example of an exception to needing 4,500 or more ways. Unless you’re in an airport or on a cruise ship where the paybacks are demonstrably worse for all games and really affect Hexbreaker in particular, playing any six up in the middle until it reaches the very top is worth it.

Just remember, if you’re taking on a six-up middle, you need to be bankrolled for it (1,000 times your bet to be safe). You’ll seldom need that much and you’ll be getting a good portion of it back most times even if you lose, but I’ve heard some horror stories with six-up Hexes.

This machine can also be a comp monster, a big reason why grinders can’t get enough of chasing middle columns that are six up. You could be fast-spinning — i.e., spinning as fast as you can — for hours.

Columns two and four move the fastest, followed by columns one and five. The middle column moves about one space every hour or so of continual spinning on average. For that reason, any grinder would also play something like this:

That’s 2,688 ways, but column four has a bonus at the top (and in this example, even column two has an above-average prize, along with bonuses in columns one and five). I don’t want this fairly simple game to seem more confusing than it is, but I did want to go over a couple of one-off examples that go against the 4,500-ways threshold.

You can trigger a bonus by reaching the top of a column that has “bonus” written out or you can hit three “free games” symbols in the reels themselves. Of course, when the reels are high, there’s more room to fit those long bonus symbols in. Along the way, you often pick up many nice line hits, especially as the reels grow, and you continue spinning until a reel reaches a skull and crossbones.

Here are a couple of videos I have for this game: