Expert pokie players at Australian online casinos will always enable all the paylines. Playing with all paylines enabled is perhaps the only inviolable practice when playing pokies. But players who have just come on board at online casinos may not be aware of the importance of this practice. The objective of this article is to educate new pokies players at Australian online casinos.
Today there are online pokies in which all paylines are enabled by default. So the issue is taken care of. But in most of the cases you will have to select the number of paylines that you want to enable. Suppose that an online pokie has 20 paylines defined. You can activate 1 payline, 2 paylines and so on right up to 20 paylines. If you read the slot rules, which will be found somewhere on the payout table, you will find one that says winning combinations will be paid only if they occur on an active payline. Now, you may have activated only 18 out of the 20 paylines. You land a five-of-a-kind combination of the highest paying symbol on the 19th payline. Landing this combination is extremely rare as any experienced pokies player will tell you. Since the 19th payline has not been activated you do not win anything. So it is better to activate all paylines rather than kick yourself later.
There is another advantage of activating all paylines. Most online pokies offer scatter payouts that are multiplied by the total bet. The total bet is the amount wagered per payline multiplied by the number of paylines activated. So if you play with less than maximum number of paylines activated, you play with a smaller total bet and you get lower scatter payouts.
The irony is that most new players do not activate all paylines in order to keep the total bet to manageable levels. If you bet AU$1 per payline and activate all 20 paylines then you have to bet AU$20 per spin. This may be more than you can afford. If your budget is only AU$10 per spin, one way of being within budget is to activate only 10 paylines. But this is the wrong way and will lead to loss of benefits as described earlier. Most online pokies offer a wide range of line bets, usually starting from AU$0.01. So if you want to keep the total bet to AU$10, play with all 20 paylines enabled but reduce the line bet to AU$0.50. This is the right way.