Break even slot strategy

Greed is often a gamblers worst enemy. The theory behind the break even strategy is that you are aiming for a common decent win but not over stretching yourself. You are managing your bankroll aiming for a break even point, anything better and you are laughing but you are reducing the risk of blowing out your whole bankroll.

The key to this strategy is like every other slot strategy: knowing your slot inside out and picking the right slot to work on.

We shall explain the strategy with a concrete example. For this example we are going to pick Playtech’s “Spiderman Attack of the Green Goblin” slot. The reason we are chosing this slot is because of the way it plays, being heavily weighted towards landing the bonus feature. Which makes it a good test case as it is easy to describe the theory. It is also one of the better Marvel Jackpot Slots and one of the few we would recommend playing. It has an RTP of 95.18%.

How does this slot play? Well as a rough guide, this slot really is all about the feature bonus. Outside of the bonus games you can expect to get a return of about 50% only. But the feature bonus does come around relatively often. From the feature bonus itself the most common win is around x18-x22 with x45-x50 reasonably common then x60-x80 less frequent. Above x80 you are heading into the top end wins which are too infrequent to work this strategy on.

So we have a reasonable idea of what to expect under normal circumstances from this slot machine. Time to set up our strategy. Let us say that we have a starting balance of €200 as we have made a standard deposit with a welcome bonus. We do not want to be blowing our budget too quickly so we are going to choose a conservative stake level of 0.25. We are going to select x60-x80 as our target win. This means that we can lose from €15 to €20 from our balance before we need to think about raising our stakes. But as we are conservative we are going to take the higher figure, a loss of €20.

Once our bank balance has dropped to €180 we will be raising our stakes. Again keeping in mind the x60 to x80 model we raise our stakes to 0.50 per spin and our break even point has now become €160. At that point we can repeat the maths again and switch to 1.00 with a break even point of €120

Now the above is all assuming that no feature bonus lands. No matter what kind of feature we win, we always play conservatively and reset our stakes to the minimum again and then work out the break even points based on this new starting point.

In our simple example above we are assuming that we did not land a single feature bonus. So how many spins did we make without landing the feature and is this to be expected? Well if we work on the 50% loss assumption we have played 160 spins at 0.25, 80 spins at 0.50 and 80 spins at 1.00 which is a total of 320 spins.

At this point we up our stake to 1.25 which would take us to a balance and loss of €100 before making the next call. At this point we would have to up our stake but raising stake beyond 1.25 with only €100 is not advisable so it would simply be damage limitation time. Keeping the stake at 1.25 until win or bust.

By simply playing against the maths and knowing what the slot is most likely to play like, you are giving yourself a statistical chance of running into profit and beating the listed rtp. In the short term there is always the chance of winning big with this strategy but equally there is the chance of blowing your whole bankroll in a short space of time. But over the long term having patience and a solid strategy, not deviating from your strategy or getting greedy or chasing losses, you may just find yourself a winning strategy to beat the casino.

Get onto some slot casinos where you can try out in free play (or visit the slot makers own websites) and test out the slots till you find one you can figure the averages out on. then do some maths and try out your strategy. Keep notes and tweak your system till you feel confident enough to hit the casino for real.