Slot Machine Paylines Guideline

When slots first went online, they all had a similar number of reels and paylines you land winning combos on to get a payout. But as they evolved, slots started getting all kinds of different shapes.

You could find slots with different reels and paylines, and today, you even find slots without paylines. And while that’s all you’re reading when you open a slot review, for instance, a newbie to slots might not know what a payline is. That’s what we’re here for today, to explain to you what paylines are and to help you understand how they work in a slot.

A payline is essentially the pattern pre-set by the developer of the slot, which would dictate where matching symbols need to land on the reels to form a winning combo. These patterns can be a straight line or a zig-zag one, they can be vertical, horizontal or diagonal, and they always come in a different number. With no further ado, let’s see how they work.

How Do Paylines Work?

Slots in the past were more guiding than slots nowadays when it comes to paylines. In the past, developers used to create slots with little numbers on the sides of the grid. Pressing those numbers, you could see the exact line drawn over the reels to tell you where symbols need to land to form a winning combo.

Nowadays, you will be able to learn about the patterns when you get to the slot’s Paytable. On the last page, you can usually see the number of paylines offered and the patterns you need to land matching combos on.

The first thing to check is whether the number of paylines is fixed or variable. That means, that the slot either asks you to bet on all lines (fixed ones) or allows you to select the number of lines you’d want in play, and place bets on those lines only (non-fixed or variable). One thing is for sure, a payline will only give a payout if you’ve placed a bet on it.

It goes without saying that when playing a fixed paylines slot, you must bet on all lines; there’s no way around that. So, if you wish to play a slot where you decide on the bets per line, you’d need to look for a slot with non-fixed paylines.

Now, in short, how paylines work is this way: in most slots, you’d need to land a winning combo from the left to the right on the reels, on a paid payline, to get a payout. In some modern slots, lines can pay both ways, from left to right and from right to left, too!

As simple as that. Remember, though, if you’re playing a non-fixed paylines slot, and you’ve bet on 10 out of 20 paylines, for instance, if a winning combo lands on a non-paid line, you don’t get the payout. That’s why probably the wisest thing to do, if you can afford it, is to play with all lines paid for. Not doing so, you might miss out on a lot of chances of winning big.

Types of Paylines

We said that paylines can come in different numbers, so you have to know the main categories, to know what to look for when choosing a slot with paylines. So, you have:

• Slots with no paylines – These are slots we mentioned, that offer no paylines, but some other mechanics that would allow you to form winning combos in different ways, by landing symbols in clusters, for instance, like in NetEnt’s Aloha! Cluster Pays.
• 1-line slots – These are slots that are the most straightforward since you only need to focus on landing winning combos on one particular line. One such incredibly interesting slot is Microgaming’s Wacky Panda.
• 3-line slots – 3 paylines were offered in slots in the past pretty frequently and that’s why you can expect to find many such slots at your disposal. Playtech’s 8 Ball is one of them, but so is RTG’s Pharaohs Gold.
• Standard 20-line slots – Slots nowadays usually come with this standard 20-payline, 5×3 grid format, so any modern slot you find which does not come with a specific mechanics, will probably offer 20 lines to land winning combos on. Pragmatic Play’s Peak Power, SG Digital’s Flame and Yggdrasil’s Elysian Jackpots are just some examples.
• Multiple-line slots – Whether it would be 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 or over, there are slots that offer multiple paylines to form winning combos on. Some great examples are Pragmatic Play’s Fire Archer, SG Digital’s Merlin’s Moneyburst, Blue Guru Games’ Otterly Amazing and GamesLab’s Towering Pays Excalibur.