What is a Slot?

A slot is a narrow, elongated depression, groove, notch, or slit in something that can be used to admit something, such as a coin or a letter. A slot is also a position or assignment in a sequence or series, as in “I applied for the slot at management training.” In the field of gambling, a slot refers to a machine that accepts paper tickets with barcodes that correspond to specific numbers or symbols on the reels.

A player may play one or more coins per spin, and each symbol on a single reel has an assigned probability of appearing in the same pay line as the winning combination. The payout table is printed on the face of the slot machine, and a winning combination must include at least one symbol and any wild symbol. In modern video slots, a symbol may occupy multiple positions on a reel and may be used to complete several different lines that result in different payout amounts.

Psychologists Robert Breen and Marc Zimmerman have found that players of video slots reach debilitating levels of involvement with gambling three times faster than those who play traditional slot machines, even if they have engaged in other types of gambling without problems. In a series of experiments, they also discovered that the audio-visual feedback associated with near misses (i.e., the sound of a machine clicking and the display of winning credits) is conditioned reinforcing. This conditional reinforcement is thought to encourage continued play by providing a positive feedback to a sub-optimal decision.