The best time to play any given pokie that has some sort of a progressive jackpot – a small or a huge one – is when the jackpot is higher than normal. If you see Mega Moolah at 10 million, play your heart out. If it’s at 1 million, well, maybe it wouldn’t be the best idea to put a lot of money into it.

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  2. In these basic pokies, you can’t win a million dollars as they’re less flashy than other pokies, but they’re the best pokies games to play at a casino. For every dollar you bet, you may have to lose 10 cents more to flashier machines with progressive jackpots – that’s a huge difference in the long run.
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Is there such a thing as the best pokies strategy? Is theres something special about the Australian pokie landscape that makes a difference in your strategy? We’ll explore those topics in this article and give you the best possible overview on how to increase your chances to win on pokies when playing from Australia.

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This article applies to online pokies, as these are much better for many reasons.

Play the best pokies

We’ll start with the basics – it’s vital to choose the pokies that play and pay best. It goes without saying you’ll be better off playing a quality game that pays well than some poor game that isn’t set up for you to win it.

Every pokie is an independent game that’s different than the others, even if pokies by the same developer will likely be similar. Pokies have different theoretical returns, they have different volatility, and while they all follow same universal guidelines, there are better and worse pokies.

Choosing a good pokie is easier said than done as there are hundreds of pokies, but Australians are limited to Betsoft, Rival and Realtime Gaming online pokies anyway so the choice of a good pokie starts with a choice between these three.

Which developer to choose?

Of the three brands available to Australians, Betsoft is by far the best one. Betsoft is releasing quality pokies every month. These have excellent theoretical payouts, amazing graphics and fun gameplay. There are over 100 games to choose from.

Realtime Gaming is a good developer but since the RTP is configurable by the casino, you don’t ever really know what the RTP of your pokie is. It could be set on Low, Medium or High setting, and you don’t know which one is it. That’s why we advise caution in case of Realtime Gaming.

Rival is the least technologically advanced developer of the three, though they too have some good pokies.

High variance is better than low variance

High variance pokies may seem tight, but that’s actually a good thing. You don’t want to be playing a pokie that gives you tiny wins all the time – you want to wait a bit and then hit the jackpot. It might as well come on your next spin.

Also, examine the paytable of the game and see if it’s capable of giving you a big win. Some pokies aren’t designed to do that – but to pamper the player with small wins.

An ideal pokie would look like this: it would be a game that can give you really big wins from many different directions, but at the same time the game should be giving you enough small wins regularly so you don’t lose a lot of money while you wait for that mega win.

Without that possibility of a big win (not all pokies have it!), it’s not worth playing the game at all. And if you aren’t getting small wins to keep you going, the game will be too risky and it would deplete your bankroll too quickly.

Betsoft pokies are among the rare ones that fit this bill. Not all of them, of course, as different pokies are set up differently, but if you’re looking for that perfect pokie, you’ll most likely find it in the Betsoft portfolio.

Choose a good time to play

Is there such a thing as the best time to play pokies? You might be surprised, but actually we have an article about that subject. It turns out this can affect your bankroll a great deal, so go ahead and read that one.

Consider playing progressive jackpot slots

Playing a ‘regular’ pokie and playing a progressive jackpot pokie are two different worlds. When you play a normal pokie, you want to make the game pay, and are primarily concerned with bet lines, the paytable, the free spins game, bonus rounds and other things related to actual gameplay.

When playing a progressive jackpot pokie, you don’t care about the game at all. This is lottery – you will have several hundred tickets as your chance to win that progressive jackpot. You’ll set your budget, make a deposit, start the game and set it on autoplay. When you’re done, you leave and come back same time tomorrow for another round.

This is how almost all the progressive jackpot winners play these pokies. Sit down in the evening, do your progressive jackpot session, and do it again tomorrow.

A big setback here is that Australians can no longer win the Mega Moolah jackpot, and that’s by far the best progressive jackpot pokie in existance. So again, you will likely be playing one of the Betsoft progressive pokies.

Claim the bonuses and free spins

Welcome bonuses and free spins are free money you can use to win on pokies, and casinos are just giving them away. This simple boost can be enough to change your luck for the better, and it might just be the edge you’re looking for.

It isn’t really worth it to play pokies without these perks. And now, let’s explore some specific pokie strategies that deal with the actual way you play the game.

Betting systems – yes or no?

We’re all familiar with betting systems such as Martingale, where you increase your bet every time you don’t win, hoping that the win is ‘due’ and you want to catch it with a higher bet rather than a lower one.

There is no proof that any kind of betting system can give you an edge while playing pokies, since every spin is random and individual, so you can’t ever know if the win is due or not. It never is. In practical tests, having a progressive betting system where you increase your bet when you don’t win is a very risky strategy that usually leads to much faster bankruptcy.

As you can see on our How to win on pokies every time article, a different strategy is needed. You need a good pokie that pays well, and when you get ahead of the game you walk away. There’s nothing in that article about making the pokie pay by increasing the bet size. That doesn’t work.

You can toy around with different bet sizes during the playing session just to add another layer of fun, but don’t ever think the game owes you anything and that the win is due.

Of course, you do want to be playing with the largest possible bet allowed by your budget. People usually set their budget, and then set the bet per spin so they can play for 500 or 1000 spins. So, if your budget is $1000, you can play 1000 spins of $1 or 500 spins of $2. And this is best left unchanged throughout your playing session.

Choices you make during the game

Finally, you have to use your best judgement at all times. Maybe you’ve been playing some pokie for a while, you lost 30% of your starting budget, and you still haven’t triggered the free spins round. The question here is – do you keep going since you already invested a lot, and because the free spins game is ‘due’, or do you quit?

In all likelihood, if the game feels too tight then it probably is too tight. There are pokies that just don’t give you the free spins very often, and if you decide to push for it, you might be left disappointed.

Best Time Of Day To Play Pokies

The key is to know what you’re doing and what kind of a pokie you’re playing. In our Pokies section you’ll find reviews of various pokies so you know what to expect from each one.