Online Slots Paylines: How They Work?

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  • Written by Anette
  • Posted on December 28, 2020
Home News & Articles Online Slots Paylines: How They Work?

One of the most important features you’ll find in a slot game is payline. If you’re just making your first steps in the exciting world of online gambling, then this is one of the first things you’ll have to learn more about, as paylines can help you decide whether a game is worth playing or not. Today, we’re going to give our best to discover how paylines work.

We hope reading this article will provide you with tips that will improve your skills and make you a better player.

What Is a Payline?

A payline represents a line in a video slot, which awards a payout when players line up a winning combination onto it. Back in the day, slot machines had only one payline, located in the middle row, so understanding how they worked was very easy.

However, modern slots can have lots of paylines, making the whole process much harder to grasp. Paylines in a slot game can be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and can even go across the reels.

More information about a slot paylines can be found by checking out the Paytable section. There you’ll have all the necessary information.

Adjustable Vs Fixed Paylines

Modern slot games can have anywhere from one to fifty paylines, or even more. The goal of additional paylines is to provide players with a better chance of winning.

Many of the slot games available today offer adjustable paylines. This will allow you to choose the number of paylines you want to use in a spin. Selecting all of them is the best choice, as it will give you the best chance of landing a win. Of course, the more paylines you choose, the more will you have to pay. The exception is the Free Spins round, during which all active lines are selected – for free.

Slots with fixed paylines don’t have that option, meaning all paylines are active, all the time.

Creating a Winning Combination

In most cases, slots will award prizes for winning combinations lined-up from left to right, starting from the leftmost reel. In practice, this means if you manage to line up three symbols starting from the middle reel, and towards the fifth one, you won’t win anything.

However, some slots, though not many, will pay both ways: from left to right and from right to left.

Again, we advise you to check out the Paytable section, where you’ll find all the details you need.

Are There Slots with No Paylines?

Some modern slots use different mechanisms and don’t have traditional paylines. Cluster pays is one such mechanism, where players need to land a cluster of at least four symbols to win, not to line them up. One of the most popular slots utilising the cluster pays mechanism in Reactoonz.

Reactoonz gameplay
What are paylines in online slots and how do they work?

Another popular mechanism, used frequently by slots over the last couple of years, is the 243 Ways to Win. Instead of lining up symbols in a specific way, this mechanism requires slot lovers to land the same icon on consecutive reels. Since such slots use a five-reel layout, the number of possible winning combinations increase exponentially, creating 243 different ways of claiming a win. Some developers went a step further, creating slots with up to 1,024 ways to win!

Slots using this mechanism boast a higher chance of getting a winning combination, but they have lower payouts when compared to games with traditional paylines. That way, they compensate for the much higher frequency of wins.

With the rise of technology, players were allowed to enjoy their games in a new and exciting way. At the same time, more paylines brought more chances to win, making slots even more appealing to a broad audience of gamblers. If you want to see them in action, here at OnlineGambling24.com, we have plenty of online casino software on offer. We’re sure you’ll find a release you’ll like!

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