In layman’s terms, payout percentage is the percentage of money the casino pays out to any player from the money it has accumulated. So for example, if a slot machine has a 98% payout percentage, it means it will pay out 98 cents out of every Euro used for gambling in it and the machine/casino will keep 2 cents to itself. Online casinos usually have higher payout percentages than land base casinos and they like to boast about it. This is a good thing, since the higher the payout percentage, the more money you can win, but make sure the information provided is real and validated by a third party.
Normally it should not be too hard to find certificates and documentation displaying the payout percentage by game and verifying the authenticity of the Random Number Generator. If it’s not clearly visible on the site, contact their support team and they will send you a link to where this information is shown or to the third party company that certified and verified the casino.
OK, so now let’s assume you found the casino website with the information and their payout percentages are certified but some reputable third party company. How do you know what is a good percentage and what is a not so good percentage? Obviously the higher the percent figure, the more money you will earn but what is standard and what is high and what is low for each game? The first thing you need to do is to analyses these figures over a certain period of time as one month’s data can easily fluctuate from another due to a vast number of reasons. So for example if from January to May a specific game’s payout percentage was of 95% and then in June it jumped to 97.5% and then from July to September it slummed down to 96% you can be certain the game your playing at has an average payout of 95.5% and not of 97.5% as that was just an extraordinary exception.
In general terms, allowing the house to keep 2% up to 4% of the total amount of money pumped into most of its games is an acceptable idea. More than that and we could say the house is getting greedy. Less than that would be considered as in the example above, an exception. So if you really want to make sure you’re playing at a safe and profitable casino, do your homework and check the payout data. Be selective of your games and learn your strategy and you will maximize your results.