Konami’s position as a creator of innovative, visually impressive slot machines and casino games comes after a long, varied history in technology and entertainment. Starting from its simple roots, this Japanese company grew into a multimedia powerhouse with gaming divisions throughout Asia and North America.

• Best Time To Play Slot Machines
• How To Play Slot Machines Smart

777 Slots is another well-rated slot machine game on the Google Play Store. It’s very popular, and has all of the features that you might expect from a slot machine game — login bonuses. Indian Spirit slot machine game has five reels and 20 paylines. The number of lines can be changed, so you are betting per line. The number of lines can be changed, so you are betting per line. Betting goes from one to 500 coins, wich means that the max bet is 10.000 coins. Knowing how slot machines work is the first step to learn the best slots secrets and tips to improve your chances to win. Despite the popularity of these games, slots are not easy to beat both when you play them on the best online casinos and at land-based slots rooms.

Staying true to its slogan of “Born from Fun,” Konami develops and distributes both original creations and games based off of its popular video game licenses.

With a growing online presence and a steadily increasing list of unique slot machine features, Konami is prepared to stay competitive in the modern gaming environment.

Free to play Konami slot machines

Top five Konami slot games

Players looking to try out some of Konami’s hottest offerings can keep an eye out for the following games.

No. 1 Dragon’s Law Twin Fever: A fun, Chinese dragon-themed slot machine, featuring fivereels and 30 paylines. This game includes basic action-stacked symbols as well as a free spin bonus round. The titular twin dragons are at the heart of the game. One or two lucky dragons can arrive after any spin to drop additional wild spaces onto the reel for some surprise wins.

No. 2 Solstice Celebration: A cute, wonderfully designed slot game has a theme around the beauty of spring in an enchanted meadow. The five-reel machine features 30 paylines and uses an enhanced version of the action-stacked symbols as a bonus. Called the Sparkle feature, all action-stacked symbols are lined with a bright border. Filling two reels with a full stack of sparkle-lined symbols nudges other partial stacks to fill their reel. It also has the potential to trigger a free spin bonus round.

No. 3 Chili Chili Fire: A five-reel 30 paylines slot has a general Mexican theme. Including action-stacked symbols and the chance to win free games, this machine also uses the Fade Away feature. After any spin, low-paying card symbols have the opportunity to fade away. The newly empty spaces then fill with random higher paying picture symbols, with a chance to turn a disappointing spin into something special.

No. 4 Lion Festival: Boosted Celebration – Inspired by Chinese New Year celebrations, this five-reel slot machine offers players a mix of neat features including a boosted middle reel that has double the symbols to make forming a winning combination that much easier. It includes action-stacked symbols and a free spin bonus round, but the bonus round includes the twist of the Balance of Fortune system. After winning free spins, players can stick with their standard 2x multiplied free spins, or they can trade stacks of five free spins for a “super-free spin” with a much higher multiplier.

No. 5 Castlevania: Labyrinth of Love – Konami has multiple Castlevania themed slots, inspired by its video game franchise of the same name. This five-reel machine includes an expanded free spin mode along with a progressive jackpot tied to the Castlevania game board. Players who trigger the minigame get to pick from different sets of potential moves to try and reach the castle. At that point, the game switches to a flashy battle minigame, where players get to spin a set of reels to try and land on attack symbols that kill enemies while hoping that they avoid the damage symbols that close off the reel. Making it past the bosses can reward the player with one of the four progressive jackpots. Sadly, Castlevania machines are generally not available on a mobile device.

Konami mobile slots

While some of Konami’s more advanced machines are sadly still stuck in physical casinos, it has developed mobile versions of many of their classic slots. Players with a mobile device should be able to find free versions of Konami’s online slots available in participating casino apps. Anyone lucky enough to live where real money online slots are legal will also find real mobile versions available.

For unlucky players, Konami does offer a nice middle ground. The My Konami Slots app is available for iOS and Android devices. This app offers several popular slots for free play. Players can collect free chips throughout the day, and the app includes a daily free bonus spin that can award credits. While packages of chips are available for purchase, patient players can stick with the Konami free casino slot games.

The Konami slots app includes linked progressive jackpots and slot tournaments for players looking for high-stakes play. Konami goes back to its video game roots by also offering daily challenges and quests, which reward players for hitting set goals or betting certain amounts. The real hook is that players can win loyalty points that they can spend on prizes and comps at real casinos, similar to Chumba Casino. Players can earn room discounts, credit toward food, tickets to great shows or just themed merchandise. It’s a great way for players to have a little fun between trips.

The rise of Konami

Konami began as a jukebox rental and repair company in 1969 based out of Osaka, Japan. The name comes from the first letters of its three original officers, Kagemasa Kozuki, YoshinobuNakama and TatsuoMiyasako. The company’s founder, Kozuki, still sits on the executive board. Konami moved away from its original jukebox focus fairly quickly, transitioning to manufacturing arcade cabinets in 1973 to take advantage of the growing video game market.

Konami would go on to produce its important additions to arcade gaming by developing hits such as the massively popular Frogger in 1981, along with gamer favorites such as Scramble and Super Cobra. The company was able to adapt to the rapidly changing video game market throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, providing titles for the Atari 2600 and the original Nintendo console. Konami adapted and evolved its popular Scramble arcade game into the fan-favorite Gradius for the NES, and also developed popular franchises such as the Castlevania and Metal Gear series.

The video game division continued to grow through the ’90s and 2000s with steady sequels and developments even as the company branched out into the gambling industry. Always looking to maintain synergy between their divisions, many of these great video game properties would be adapted into themed slot machines.

Konami’s casino gaming division began with its entry into the Japanese pachinko machine market in September 1992. After several years, the company opened Konami Australia in late 1996. In 1997, this subsidiary would oversee the rollout of Konami’s expansion into the Australian gaming market and later the general Asian market.

Konami expanded into the American casino gaming market in January 2000. The move into the American market was cemented with the construction of a manufacturing and development office in Las Vegas in 2005. The 360,000-square-foot facility served as its base of operations for expansions through North America, South America and Europe. Building on the success, Konomi opened a second facility in Las Vegas in 2015.

Konami’s unique features

While Konami is known for its striking visual design, the company has introduced some software innovations to offer exciting updates to the classic slot machine design. Its development takes full advantage of the ability to modify digital reels before the game or switch symbols after a spin. As a rule of thumb, Konami has focused on enhancing standard slot machine play rather than focusing on adding separate bonus rounds. Konami’s unique twists on the slot machine formula give players a chance to see ordinary spins suddenly change into rich jackpots.

The action-stacked symbols feature

Players of Konami slots are almost guaranteed encounter its action-stacked symbols system. This feature creates sections across all the reels in a game that pick one single symbol to stack for that spin. With a little luck, players will see these sets of stacked symbols fill up their paylines for big wins.

Also, many games have separate bonus features that tie into the action-stacked symbols feature. For example, players may see the reels get nudged into higher payouts with the right set of lucky frames.

Other variations on standard play include dynamic reels that can morph after a spin. In certain games, players may see new wild symbols appear to fill out lines, or they may see low-value spaces disappear to make room for big winners.

The Balance of Fortune features

That’s not to say that Konami has ignored its bonus games, even if it sticks to traditional free spins and multipliers. When going through Konami’s catalog, players will find innovations such as the Balance of Fortune system. This offers winners a choice in how their bonus game plays out, usually based around a more certain smaller payout versus a riskier shot at a big return.

The Mirror Reels bonus feature

The addition of special Mirror reels in bonus rounds also adds a fun change of pace to free spins. Mirror reels are what they sound like, with the two leftmost and rightmost reels mirroring one another, making it easier than ever to get a straight line of five symbols.

Similarly, while many of Konami’s games feature bonus games and special features instead of traditional jackpots, some entries feature progressive jackpot systems.

Konami’s progressive jackpot games

Games such as Pirate’s Jackpot and Pharoah’s Wish include stand-alone progressive jackpots. Konami also has machines with community-linked progressive jackpots.

For example, Beat the Field offers players — in a bank of linked machines — each a chance at different progressive jackpots when one player in the bank triggers the special round. Eligible players can win set bonuses or a progressive jackpot based on the results of a simulated horse race.

Machines, such as the new Power Boost Inferno, offer a supreme progressive jackpot that can potentially be linked across multiple participating casinos.

Konami’s recent innovations have also shifted toward more noticeable changes to gameplay. In 2016, the company unveiled the Crystal Cyclone. This upgrade adds a social element to Konami’s older physical machines. The system places a roulette wheel in the center of several linked Konami slot machines.

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When triggered, players on the linked machines get to watch bonus balls fall onto the spinning wheel in the center with credits and bonuses applied based on where the balls land.

Finally, Konami’s development comes full circle with the recent development of a partially skill-based Frogger game that provides increased payouts to players who can get their frog farther up the randomly generated arcade game.

Apparently playing slot machines is more fun than just about anything. Old articles about the casino industry used to tout that slot machines made up 70% of a casino’s revenue, on average. More recent literature suggests that it’s even more than that—along the lines of 80%.

I live near the Winstar Casino, and I have a number of friends who visit the casino at least once a week—sometimes more—just to play slot machines there. I’m not a fan of slot machines to begin with, although I enjoyed The Big Lebowski slot machine for about an hour during my last visit with my buddies.

I thought it would be fun to write a post explain how a smart person might play slot machines. I don’t know how smart I am, so a lot of this post will just look at what I THINK a smart gambler might do. Maybe this will help inform your own decisions.

1- Smart Slot Machine Players Don’t Play with Money They Can’t Afford to Lose

You’ve probably seen the expression, “scared money always loses.”

This is true for any kind of gambling, but maybe not for the reasons you think. It’s not a supernatural occurrence based on the vibrations you’re sending out into the universe.

The fact is, slot machines are a worse bet in the casino than almost any other. The odds are against you, and in a significant way.

If you have money set aside for rent, or for a utility bill, or for a child support payment, you shouldn’t gamble it on a slot machine. Slots are negative expectation games.

In fact, you shouldn’t gamble money you can’t afford to lose on positive expectation games, either. That’s because games of chance are RANDOM. In the short term, you can lose any game, even if you have a mathematical edge over the casino or the other players.

Any money you gamble with should be earmarked as part of your entertainment budget. The healthiest way to approach gambling on slot machines is to treat it as entertainment. You’ll sometimes win money, and that’s great, but there’s no way to become a professional slot machine player.

Don’t even try.

2- Smart Slot Machine Players Keep Detailed Records

I often relate a story about how I used to work in middle management in a corporation in Dallas. I wanted to be good at my job, so I studied several management books. One of the first and most important things I learned is that performance measured is performance managed.

This means that if you’re not keeping written records managing your performance, you’re making a mistake.

Of course, slot machine players aren’t professional gamblers, and they can’t improve their performance by playing more skillfully.

But I’m convinced that smart gamblers, even recreational gamblers, benefit from mindfulness. One of the easiest ways to be mindful of something is by paying attention to it. If you’re keeping records, it’s easy to pay attention to it.

Another benefit to keeping written records of your results at the casino is for tax purposes. If you win more than $6000 on a slot machine, the casino sends a notice to the IRS to report the income. If you’ve lost $4000 prior to that at the casino, you can probably deduct that and only pay taxes on your net winnings—the winnings minus the previous losses in that calendar year.

Finally, the biggest mistake I see most slots players making is their belief that they’re winning more often than they’re losing or that they’re breaking even.

The payback percentages for the slot machines in Oklahoma can’t possibly be higher than 75% or 80%. But all my friends are convinced that they’re losing far less money than they actually are losing. Some of them, in fact, are convinced that they’re net winners.

I have one buddy, though, who gambles so much that he’s moved up to the next tier of the players club. He gets a free cabana by the pool. He knows how much he’s lost so far this year. Even though he plays a lot and loses a lot, he knows the amount.

Knowing is better than not knowing.

3- Smart Slot Machine Players Count Funny Things

Some of the best advice I’ve ever read about playing the slots is that the most important thing you can do to minimize your losses is to slow down your rate of play. The more spins you make per hour, the likelier you are to lose a lot of money per hour. You don’t even necessarily get more pleasure out of it.

I took a recovering meth addict to the casino with me once. I’ve never seen anyone play a slot machine faster. If she wasn’t making 900 bets per hour, she was coming close. I’ve also never seen anyone lose that much money that fast.

I’d had a discussion with gambling writer Michael Bluejay a week before my last visit to the casino, though. He’d mentioned that he’d read one of my posts about how important rate of play was to your predicted hourly loss. It got me thinking about making actual measurements of my own rate of play next time I was at the casino.

The average number of spins per hour that everyone quotes when talking about slot machines is 600 per hour. I decided to see how close I came to that number, so I counted off each spin as I made it. I also waited until all my winnings were credited before making the next spin.

I made 201 spins in half an hour. (I used the stopwatch function on my phone to track this.) This means I was making 400 spins per hour on average.

That’s only 2/3 of the average, so I’ll lose 2/3 of what the average player will lose spending the same amount of time on the machine.

If you really think of gambling as entertainment that you’re paying for on an hourly basis, you’ll easily see why this is a good thing. Bargain gambling is good gambling.

I also tracked how much money I lost over that time period, so I was able to do a short-term calculation of the machine’s payback percentage. I know that with only 201 trials, my number isn’t close to perfect. But it’s still fun and interesting to track such things.

From a longer-term perspective, if you’re keeping records, you know how much you’re losing, and you don’t fall into the trap that some people do of thinking they’re winning at a game they’re actually losing.

4- Smart Slot Machine Players Take Advantage of the Players Club

I’ve weighed the pros and cons of the players club. Most writers in this industry, by the way, make an unqualified recommendation that you always join the players club. I don’t think this should be the default choice for everyone, though.

The players club is a tool the casino uses to market to gamblers. If you’re more susceptible to advertising than the average person, you might wind up losing more money to the casino than is reasonable or expected.

Or you might just hate getting advertising in the mail.

The players club card is a credit card shaped plastic card that you insert into the machine so that the casino can reward you for your play. They give you points based on how much money you place in bets. These points aren’t related directly to your losses, either—they’re related to the amount you gamble.

If you wager $450 per hour through a slot machine with the card inserted, you’ll get points based on that amount even if you win over the course of an hour, a session, or a visit to the casino.

These points are then used to give you rewards like free food, lodging, and entertainment. The casino knows that the more you play, the more money they make in the long run. Their losses are averaged over thousands of players per day, and so are their wins. Since the slot machines pay out less than they take in, the casino has no doubt about its profit potential.

These rewards are cool and worthwhile, usually. I think, for most gamblers, especially smart ones, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks here.

But you know better than I do how important your privacy is. If you don’t want to get ads via direct mail, being a member of the players club might not be for you.

Keep this in mind, too. The casinos track your activity on the slot machines closely. This gives them aggregate information about player tendencies that they can use to push players’ psychological buttons.

Suppose a casino analyzes their slot machines’ hit ratios versus time spent on machine. They learn that the average time on the machines with a hit ratio of 30% is 90 minutes per game.

But on the machines with a hit ratio of 25%, the average time spent on average on each game is only 60 minutes.

The payback percentage can be adjusted to anything the casino wants, regardless of the hit percentage. You can have a slot machine with a hit percentage of 30% with an 85% payback percentage, but you can also have a slot machine with a hit percentage of 25% with the same 85% payback percentage. All the slot machine makers need to do is adjust the payback amounts and probabilities for the various combinations of symbols.

They don’t do this in any kind of short-term way.

But the longer they collect this kind of data, the more of it they have, and they’re becoming incredibly efficient at exploiting slot machine players’ psychological tendencies.

You have to decide if it’s smart to contribute to that.

5- Smart Slot Machine Players Learn How the Machines Work Before Playing

Maybe this should have been the first bullet point, but that other stuff is SO important, too.

Any fool can put money in a slot machine, press a button, and win or lose.

But what’s fun about that if you don’t know what you’re looking at?

Here’s one of the best slot tips you’ll ever find – If you really want to have fun on a slot machine, you need to understand what you’re doing.

Let’s start with the really basic stuff:

At most casinos, you can put money into the machine in various ways:

• Cash
• Coins
• Payout tickets
• Player cards

If you’re using cash, you can use almost any denomination you can think of, from $1 on up to $100.

Most modern slot machines don’t take coins anymore, but if you can find one, you just drop the money into the slot. (That’s where the games get their name, by the way.)

The payout tickets can be used just like cash in modern slot machines. You also use them when it’s time to cash out—you just take them to one of the machines that converts them into currency. When I started, you still got your winnings in coins. Those days are long gone.

You can use your player card to put money in the machine if you’ve been awarded rebates to your card in the form of credits.

No matter which method you use, the slot machine converts your money into credits on the machine. You can see how many credits you have in the machine at any time. The total is always prominently displayed. Depending on the game’s denomination, you might have trouble converting that amount to cash in your head. But the machine will do that for you when you cash out.

Some slot machine games include their pay tables on the machine itself, but others require you to access a screen via their touch-screen. (Look for an option labeled “HELP.”) The pay table lists the symbols along with what the payouts are for the various possible combinations of those symbols. It will also include information about where the pay lines are. These are the lines along the front of the machine where the symbol combinations occur.

This screen will also explain things like the bonus games, scatter symbols, and wild symbols.

Finally, you need to know where the CASH OUT button is. Don’t just sit there and play until all your money’s gone just because you can’t find the CASH OUT button. That really is crazy.

6- Smart Players Know that Denominations Can Be Misleading

You’ll hear a lot of people talk about “penny slots,” “nickel slots,” and “quarter slots.”

This does not mean that you’re betting a penny per spin, a nickel per spin, or a quarter per spin.

Most games encourage or force you to bet multiple coins per pay line, and you usually need to bet on multiple pay lines, too.

The most recent slot machine I played on was a penny slot called Lightning Sevens. It was a penny slot, but you had to bet 5 units per line to be eligible for the jackpots. (The game had 4 progressive jackpots, too.) The game also had 25 paylines.

As a result, I was betting $1.25 per spin on a penny slot machine.

This is another reason you should pay close attention to the HELP or INFO screen. On a lot of slot machine games, you can win the top jackpot even if you’re not betting max coins. But some games have lower payouts for the lower denominations.

It’s important to know the difference.

7- Smart Players Don’t Worry about the Locations of the Machines

One of the strategies you’ll often see touted on websites and in old books about playing slot machines is to try to play the games on the edges, nearest the walkways. The theory is that the casinos put the loosest machines there to attract more players to the games.

This might have been true at one casino at one time a long time ago.

But that’s almost certainly not true in a modern casino.

Casino managers probably employ some type of methodology related to the placement of their machines, but it’s probably subtle enough and complicated enough that you’ll never be able to use that logic to your advantage.

In fact, smart slot machine players don’t really worry about any kind of slot machine strategy at all. After all, the smarter you are, the more you realize that no slot machine strategy has any kind of validity at all. These games are entirely random.

Best Time To Play Slot Machines

You see, it’s worthwhile to study basic strategy in blackjack. It’s even worthwhile to learn how to count cards. Your decisions matter at the blackjack table—mathematically.

But on a slot machine, all you can do is put your money into the machine and hope for the best.

I’ve seen all kinds of silly advice that’s supposed to help you become a winner at the slot machines. For example, I read one author who said that if you get more than 7 spins in a row with no winners, you should switch machines. The same author suggests setting a percentage of your “session bankroll” as a win goal and a loss limit.

You’re then supposed to quit when you’ve won that much or when you’ve lost that much.

That kind of money management strategy doesn’t really matter, though. In the long run, you’re just playing one huge, almost infinite session. Arbitrarily taking breaks during your lifetime gambling session doesn’t increase your chances of winning.

The only way to do that is to only play slots once, get lucky, quit while you’re ahead, and never play again.

That’s a smart strategy in its way, but it’s a little limiting if you enjoy playing slot machines.

8- Smart Players Avoid the Biggest Progressive Slot Machines

A progressive slot machine is one which has an ever-increasing jackpot. These come in 3 varities:

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1. Standalone progressives
2. In-house progressives
3. Wide area network progressives

A standalone progressive takes any bet that’s made on that machine and applies a small percentage of it toward its jackpot, which gets larger as a result.

An in-house progressive is networked with other slot machines in the same casino. Any bet on any progressive in that in-house network increases the size of the jackpot for all those machines.

A wide area network progressive is a game that’s networked with multiple slot machines in multiple casinos. Any wager made on any machine in the network increases the size of the overall jackpot, which can increase its overall size.

How To Play Slot Machines Smart

Here’s why smart slot machine players tend to avoid such machines, though:

That tiny percentage that goes to fuel the jackpot comes out of the payback percentage. The full payback percentage on the machine isn’t fully realized until you’ve won it. In the case of the largest progressive jackpots, that might not happen ever.

Megabucks is the best known of the largest progressive jackpots. The jackpot starts at $10 million, and it’s not unusual for the jackpot to get as high as $20 million.

As you might guess, the probability of winning Megabucks is on a par with winning the lottery.

And we all know that smart gamblers don’t play the lottery, right?

The opposite of a progressive slot machine, by the way, is a “flat-top” machine. That’s a game where the jackpot is a flat dollar amount. It doesn’t change as the game is played.

Flat top machines generally have better payback percentages than progressive machines.

Conclusion

Let me be clear about this:

Slot machines are always a negative expectation bet. No amount of smarts or strategy can help you overcome this mathematical edge.

This doesn’t mean you can’t play slot machines like a smart person. You just need to do what a smart slot machine player does—treat the games as the entertainment devices that they are. Treat the money you wager on such machines as an entertainment expense.