Denominations on Online Slots: How They Relate to Your Total Bet

Brian Christopher Jan 16, 2025, 12:19 PM
min read
online slot denominations

When you play online slots, most games encourage you to choose your bet amount. But some have extra steps to determine your bet, following the traditional slots formula that you’ll find on slot machines in land-based casinos. 

One important aspect of it is the denomination, sometimes shown on a slot as “denom,” and in this post, I’ll share with you what denominations are, and how they factor into your total bet when playing certain online slots.

Slot Denomination Defined

First, let’s define what slot denomination means. Simply put, the denomination is an amount, declared in terms of dollars or cents, that determines what a single credit is worth. For instance, a 1 cent (or penny) denomination means each credit is worth 1 cent. A $1 denomination means a credit is worth a dollar. A 10 cent (or dime) denomination is worth 10 cents.

Easy enough, right? Where some players can get tripped up is when wins are declared in credits, because then you have to do the math. It’s easy when it’s declared in 1 cent or $1  credits, but math gets involved when they’re less common, like 5 cent or 25 cent denominations.

Some online slot makers are more likely to have this broken out as a choice. We’ve seen it on slots made by Konami, Everi and NetEnt, but other makers may have this feature as well.

Completing the Bet

Once you have a denomination set, the other half of the selections tend to come in one or two other elements: The number of pay lines or the line bet multiplier. An example of this is seen above on Double Jackpot Bullseye by Everi.

The number of lines is able to be chosen on some slots – if you bet less lines, you have less ways to win, but you also reduce your bet because you’re not betting to play all the lines. More lines means a bigger overall bet, but more ways to win.

Then, the line bet multiplier (or bet level) comes down to how many times you wish to multiply the final bet. That can be as little as 1, and often caps out at 5 or 10, but will depend on the slot’s settings.

In some cases you can’t select the number of lines. In those cases you’ll only be given the choice of denomination and bet multiplier.

Calculating the Slot Bet

When there’s a choice of lines involved, the calculation looks like this:

Denomination x # of lines x bet multiplier

So if you are playing a 25 cent denomination game with five lines and three credits per line:

$0.25 x 5 x 3 = $3.75

Conversely, if you are on a 10 cent denomination slot, 20 lines and a multiplier of 1, that would look like this:

$0.10 x 20 x 1 = $2.00

If there’s no line count, the line count will be replaced by the overall bet level for the game. 

For example, Lucky Envelope Crimson Riches by Konami has an 88 credit bet level, so a 1 cent denomination with a bet level of 10 would look like this:

$0.01 x 88 x 10 = $8.80

But a 5 cent denomination with a line bet of 1 on that same slot would look like this:

$0.05 x 88 x 1 = $4.40

Takeaways on Slot Denominations

Ultimately, denomination has a critical role in calculating the total amount played. While some online slots just bake all the calculations in and give you a list of total bets to choose from, others will have to select the denomination, bet level and lines (in some cases), each of which has an impact on your overall bet. 

But as I always say, you don’t have to be good at math to play slots, it does all the work for you. This is why I love zero skill games like slots, it’s all for fun!