What is a Slot?

A slot is a set of symbols on a casino machine’s reels that may trigger different bonus events and payoffs. Players place coins or, in “ticket-in, ticket-out” machines, paper tickets with barcodes into the slots to activate the reels. When the reels stop, if a winning combination of symbols is displayed, the player receives credits according to the machine’s paytable. Most slot games have a theme and include classic symbols such as fruits, bells, and stylized lucky sevens.

Slot is also the term for a position or period of time: The program was scheduled in the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays.

The term slots has also become a general colloquial name for any small unit of computing capacity, especially one used in an embedded system or computer server. In a slot-based computing model, excess capacity is periodically reassigned between jobs and is not reported in detailed execution statistics. This approach is called slot borrowing, and it can help to reduce job delays and improve overall system performance.