What is a Slot?

A narrow aperture or groove, as in a piece of wood or a vehicle.

A position, especially one in a team or sequence of events.
Slot is the Latin word for “position,” and it’s also used to describe a particular position in a machine or on a track. In a slot car race, for example, each driver occupies a specific slot on the track. It’s easy to confuse these two uses, but there are distinct differences. In a car race, for example, the driver can move his or her slot during a session, but the machine cannot change its positioning on the track. In a casino, however, a player can switch machines to improve his or her chances of winning. The same is true of a video game, although the slot may be in a different place on each screen. Before microprocessors were introduced to slot machines, each symbol on a reel would appear only once — and the probability of it appearing was usually disproportionate to its frequency on a physical reel. Modern electronic slots compensate for this by assigning a weight to each symbol. This results in a combination that is more likely to result in a jackpot than a random combination of symbols.