Learn some pokie slang

Just like in a team of doctors or a motorcycle gang, the casino and gaming industry has its own jargon. The web is teeming with slang and short terms and every gaming category has its own language, with words that have acquired new meanings as well as brand new coined words. You may recognise terms such as ‘paylines’, ‘scatter’, ‘paytable’ and ‘progressive pokies’ – if not, it’s high time you learned some pokieplayer slang.

Pokies – slot machines/web-based one-armed bandits

When you’re playing online pokies, you are playing the modern-day equivalents of one-armed bandits. ‘Slots’ has become an internationally recognised term, even outside the English language and Pokies is used in Australia.

Paylines – the potential winning lines in pokies

Almost all modern pokies have been equipped with a certain number of paylines. A payline is a line in the pokie on which you want the winning symbols to stop. If the right number of winning symbols stop on a payline, you win! The number of paylines varies from machine to machine. The variation between two games can be as large as 20 to 30 paylines.

Paytable – a table of winning symbols and combinations

Every pokie has a paytable showing the winning symbols of the game and the value of each symbol. A paytable shows you how many winning symbols are needed in order to reach a certain prize.

Scatter & Wild – function-activating symbols

Scatter and wild are two types of function symbol, which activate the special functions of a game. The scatter symbol usually activates free spins and the wild symbol is usually seen as the joker card of a pokie. That means that it can be turned into a winning symbol, which can increase the frequency and amount of your winnings.

Progressive pokies – pokies where the jackpot keeps growing

As the name indicates, progressive pokies involve something that keeps on growing – namely the jackpot. This increases in size with the number of people playing the slot and the amount of money being put at stake, resulting in an ever-growing gold mine – until somebody wins it, of course.

Bonus game – an extra game within a game

Bonus games are commonly found in pokies. A bonus game is usually activated when two or three bonus symbols come up on the screen. As a rule, the bonus game is essentially a new game within the pokie machine and it is usually in keeping with the general theme of the slot.

Now that you’ve learned the most common slang terms and expressions, you’ll have no problems keeping up with the jargon used by other online pokieplayers!