A professional slot player (be it land based or online) treats their gaming like a job. They need to make a salary every month as a bare minimum and have a large enough bankroll to cover the months where they lose and for their holiday months.
These players are not the high rollers you would expect them to be, quite the opposite. Over a working day (let’s say Monday to Friday, 9 to 5) if they make a profit of just £100 (or €150 or $150) they will be quite happy. That’s a good days work.
Pro slot players do not make spins of €20 or €50 or €100. They have a set range of stakes which they never deviate from. Such a range could be €0.10 – €2.50 or €0.50 – €5.00 or anything in between. But they are strict. After a big win they do not up their stakes beyond their limit. They do not get greedy thinking they are on an unbeatable run. They do not play the martingale system (progression play) beyond their limit when on a bad run.
To put it simply, unless you are prepared to lose a huge chunk of money in a very short space of time, DON’T play too high a stake. Play conservatively and play consistently.
If you are unaware of what the martingale system is, putting it very briefly it is a roulette system whereby the player waits for a sequence of balls dropping on the same colour, and then bets the next spin of the wheel on the opposite colour. If this is again the same colour and they lose, the player doubles his stake and bets on the opposite colour again. The player keeps doubling his stake till eventually the ball drops as a win for then player and over the whole sequence of spins he is in profit.
Slot machine martingale system works two ways, short term strategy or long term strategy. With short term strategy the player bets lowest stake on a single spin, if it is not a winning spin then the player doubles his stake and so on till a winning spin comes in. The longer term strategy is to play 100 spins at lowest stake and if the bonus feature has not landed then double the stake for the next 100 spins and so on till the feature lands.
Let me explain exactly how you lose when sticking rigidly to the martingale system. With all the best intentions and with all the knowledge of the slots variance, the slots bonus hit frequency and the slots rtp, the martingale system is inherently flawed. Quite simply you will always have good runs and you will always have bad runs. With the martingale system your good runs always happen at low stakes meaning your profits are low. Your bad runs will see your stakes shoot through the roof and if you do land the big win you are waiting for, you will likely only break even for the whole run. Equally likely is that a bad run will see you chase and chase and eventually your stakes will be so high you will burn through your whole bank balance and another couple of deposits. It just doesn’t work. You need to play smarter than that.
On any slot machine from any provider and at any time you can go 50 spins without even a tiny winning spin. You can go 2,000 spins without landing the bonus feature. Unlikely bad runs but they do happen and they happen more often than you think.
Side note: There is one way to play the martingale system without even altering your stake. If you know the rough variance of the slots you can play the same stake on a low variance, medium variance and then high variance slots. It isn’t always all about the stakes you bet.