Advantage Slots

This one surely belongs on the Mount Rushmore of advantage games. But make sure you’re playing the fourth installment and not the first, second, third, or get this, fifth! Four happens to be where the money is.

Anyway, there are a few ways we’d play it, with the dream being a bonus with one coin already filled:

It’s a little hard to read above, but check out the three small graphics above columns two, three, and four: double symbols, king stacks, and bonus. Bonus is the money graphic and in this example, it even comes with one of the two coin slots under it filled. Once that second coin comes, you get a bonus.

Here’s that blown up:

We happily play any bonus even without a coin; just make sure it doesn’t say “Bonus Complete!” underneath it. If it has that, the bonus was hit the previous spin and is no longer active.

OK, so if any active bonus is a slam-dunk play, what else might we be looking for? Glad you asked:

We also play any jackpot graphic that has at least one coin already provided. You’ll notice this one has the following from left to right above the reels: multiplier, wild stacks, and jackpot. It also doesn’t matter where the bonus and jackpot features are located on the board.

Here’s that one blown up too since it’s a little hard to see:

Jackpot is the second-most desirable symbol and some pros play any active jackpot — remember, it can’t have “Complete” underneath it — but I usually pass on a jackpot without a coin.

But wait, there’s more!

I also play any active feature for however many spins are left. In the example above, the second graphic, wild stacks, reads that it has “2 spins left.” We can see it plainly under the graphic in red. You usually won’t win much, if anything, in this example, but it’s a low-risk, medium-reward type of play that I don’t turn down.

Many grinders play even more scenarios and if any of this gets too confusing, you can skip this paragraph or go to the videos. If all three features have one coin, you can play that until you trigger one of them. It usually doesn’t cost much, but the advantage is slim long term. Also, and this is quite rare, if there are two completed features, you can sacrifice one spin to see what the next symbol will be for both. You’re hoping only to uncover a bonus symbol, which will happen from time to time. You’d then spin until you hit the bonus.

What’s great about this game, unlike some others that offer an advantage, is that the advantage isn’t glaringly obvious. People get up from this game all the time with the bonus active. This is also a game that sometimes turns up in high-limit sections, where you can really clean up if you have enough of a bankroll with you. Thirty or so spins is toward the high end of what it would take to hit.

For the bonus, you can either trigger it with the symbol on top of the reels or get extra lucky and hit one on a random spin. You’ll then either pick the buoy bonus or free-games option. Free games have a higher ceiling and lower floor short term, but they’re the same long term. For the jackpot, you spin a wheel and usually land on a disappointing wedge that pays 10x your bet or so, but there’s always a small chance to hit something enormous.

I have a couple of videos of this one: