Most people throw money at casino games without reading the pay table once, and that’s exactly how casinos want it.
I’ve been there. Sat down at a slot, hammered the spin button for an hour, walked away down £60 wondering what just happened. It wasn’t until I actually started reading pay tables that I realised I’d been playing some absolutely terrible games when better ones were sitting right next to them. Same bet size, completely different odds. I just hadn’t looked.
This isn’t a complicated skill. It takes about two minutes once you know what you’re looking for. But almost nobody does it, which is a shame — because a casino pay table explained properly can genuinely change which games you choose to play.
What Even Is a Pay Table?
A pay table is basically the game’s rulebook. It tells you what each symbol or hand combination pays out, what the bonus features do, and sometimes — if you’re lucky — gives you information that lets you calculate or at least estimate the game’s return to player (RTP).
Every casino game that involves variable payouts has one. Slots have them. Video poker has them. Some table game side bets have simplified versions. They’re usually buried behind a little “i” button or a “paytable” tab that most players never tap.
The casino isn’t hiding this information exactly. They just make it easy to ignore. And most people do ignore it, because spinning feels more fun than reading. I get it. But spending 90 seconds on the pay table before you start playing is probably the highest-value thing you can do at a casino.
How to Read a Slot Pay Table
A slot pay table will typically show you a few things:
- Symbol values – What each symbol pays for 3, 4, or 5 of a kind. The difference between these can be massive.
- Wild and scatter rules – What the wild actually substitutes for, and what triggers the bonus round.
- Bonus feature mechanics – How free spins work, whether there are multipliers, what the retrigger rules are.
- Payline information – How many ways you can win, and whether it pays both ways or just left to right.
- Maximum win – Often shown as a multiplier of your stake. A 5,000x max win on a £1 spin is £5,000. Sounds great. But if it only hits once in ten million spins, it’s basically decorative.
Here’s the thing I wish someone had told me years ago: the symbol values tell you a lot about the game’s volatility. If the top symbol pays 500x and everything else pays 5x or less, that game is going to feel like a grind with rare big hits. If the payouts are spread more evenly, you’ll get smaller wins more often. Neither is better — it depends what you’re after — but knowing this before you start means you’re choosing intentionally rather than finding out the hard way after 40 spins.
What you won’t usually find on a slot pay table is the actual RTP percentage. For that, you have to go looking separately — the game’s info page on the developer’s website, or the casino’s own game info section if they bother publishing it. Some do, some don’t. If a casino doesn’t publish RTP figures, that alone tells you something.
Video Poker Is Where Pay Tables Actually Get Interesting
If you’re not playing video poker, honestly give it a go — but only once you understand the pay table, because this is one game where reading it makes a genuine mathematical difference.
A video poker pay table directly determines the game’s RTP. Not approximately. Exactly. The most famous example is Jacks or Better. The “full pay” version of Jacks or Better — sometimes called 9/6 Jacks or Better because it pays 9x for a full house and 6x for a flush — has an RTP of around 99.5% with perfect strategy. That’s exceptional for a casino game.
But casinos often run 8/5 or even 7/5 versions of the same game. Looks almost identical. Plays identically. But that one number change knocks the RTP down to around 97.3%. Over time, that’s a significant difference.
How do you spot this? You read the pay table. Specifically:
- Find the row for Full House and check the payout per coin
- Find the row for Flush and check the payout per coin
- If Full House pays 9 and Flush pays 6, you’ve got the good version
- If those numbers are lower, the house edge is higher — often significantly so
This is the clearest example I know of where a 30-second pay table check has a direct, calculable impact on your expected return. Most people walk past a 7/5 machine and a 9/6 machine without noticing they’re different games.
RTP and What It Actually Means
RTP stands for Return to Player, and it’s the percentage of all money wagered that a game pays back over a very large number of spins or hands. A game with 96% RTP theoretically returns £96 for every £100 wagered — but that’s over millions of rounds, not your Tuesday night session.
When you’re comparing RTP casino games, here’s a rough guide of what different figures actually mean in practice:
- 99%+ – Exceptional. Full pay video poker, some blackjack variants with perfect strategy. Rare on slots.
- 97-99% – Good. Worth playing if you enjoy the game. Most decent video poker variants sit here.
- 95-97% – Average for slots. The industry “standard” that most branded slots sit around.
- Below 94% – Dodgy territory. Some slots — particularly ones in airports, seaside arcades, or low-effort mobile casinos — live here. Walk past them.
The pay table alone won’t always give you the RTP directly, but it gives you enough information to compare games intelligently. A slot with massive top payouts and tiny base game returns is probably high volatility and potentially lower RTP. A video poker table with reduced payouts on common hands is definitely lower RTP.
The Stuff Pay Tables Won’t Tell You (But Should)
I want to be honest here — there are limits to what pay tables tell you, and casinos know this.
On slots, the pay table shows symbol values but it doesn’t show you the weighting of the reels. Two slots can have identical pay tables and completely different RTPs because the probability of each symbol landing is hidden inside the game’s code. The pay table shows you the rewards; it doesn’t show you how often you’ll actually achieve them.
This is why I always try to look up the published RTP separately — on the developer’s site or somewhere reputable — rather than relying entirely on what the pay table implies. Sites like Casinomeister or individual developer pages (Pragmatic, NetEnt, Play’n GO all publish RTP figures) are useful for this.
Also worth noting: some online casinos run games at reduced RTP settings. The developer might publish a game at 96% RTP, but the casino has paid to run it at 94%. It’s legal. It happens. The only way to protect yourself is to play at casinos that publish their RTP settings per game, not just link to the developer’s default figure.
Making It a Habit Without Killing the Fun
I’m not saying you need to spend twenty minutes analysing every game before you play. That would drain the enjoyment out of it pretty fast.
What I do now is simple:
- Before I play any new slot, I open the pay table and spend 60 seconds understanding the top symbol value, the bonus trigger, and the max win. That’s it.
- For video poker, I always check the full house and flush payouts before I sit down. Takes ten seconds.
- If the RTP isn’t published anywhere I can find, I pick a different game. There are plenty of options.
None of this turns gambling into maths homework. It just means you’re making informed choices rather than purely random ones. You’re still gambling. The house still has an edge. But you’re not voluntarily playing the worst version of a game because you couldn’t be bothered to look.
Final Thoughts
Reading a casino pay table is one of those things that sounds obvious when someone explains it to you, and yet almost nobody actually does it. I didn’t for years. I just picked games based on how they looked or what other people were playing, and I lost money on games that weren’t worth my time when better options were right there.
It won’t make you a winner. Nothing will guarantee that. But understanding what you’re playing — what it pays, how it works, what the RTP is — means you’re spending your gambling budget on games that at least give you a fair shot. That’s all you can really ask for.
Next time you sit down at a game you’ve never played, just open the pay table first. Two minutes. You might be surprised what you find — or what you decide to walk away from.
