Hi everyone. Glad I found this community. Hoping you can help with a "strategy" question.

I have been playing a lot of slots lately in a variety of online casinos. Strangely, slots have never been my thing at live casinos (I’m a table games guy), but because online casinos will be pretty generous with bonuses if you stick to slot play, that’s where I’ve spent most of my time. And surprisingly, it’s working out pretty well for me.

I play standard five-reel video slots with 20, 25 & 50 line payouts. Most of them have some sort of free spin feature that triggers if you hit 3 or more scatter symbols (I’m talking about the ones that can appear anywhere in the reels; not the ones requiring you to hit three consecutively starting from the far left reel). For the others, they require you to hit symbols in certain reels to trigger the feature. For all slots with features, if you hit the first scatters you need on the first four reels, the remaining reels will slow down for a short amount of time, allowing you to hit the “Stop” button when you think it will land on a deciding scatter.

Lately, I seem to be hitting one of two streaks: either I’m able to get two scatters in the first 2-3 reels and then blindly hitting stop and getting 1-2 more (for spins + cash), or I put it on “Autoplay” and after five minutes, I check back and see that the feature hit and is waiting for me to activate. When neither of these things happen, NOTHING goes right! I can’t get the reels lined up, and the algorithm isn’t allowing it to stop naturally. And the payouts in between aren’t anything notable to sustain the bankroll until I can hit a feature.

For veteran “online slot jockeys”, is there any sort of strategy or pattern for lining up the reels and stopping it more often than not? Are they typically standardized, i.e., the symbols will always follow a pattern, or randomized? Is there any publicly-available data that shows the chances of hitting a scatter feature via the machine vs. manually stopping reels? Looking forward to your responses.