Once upon a time, slot machines had three reels and one payline. Even when mechanical slots made way for video slots, and land-based casinos were joined by online casinos, many slots players preferred the simple life and so single-line slots still exist and are still played by millions of slot lovers everywhere. However, most online slots players are not old enough to remember classic slots; for the hip slot player, the more lines the better and so the multi-line slot machine is a big attraction.

Multi-payline slots usually offer other features to keep players on their toes, such as wild symbols and scatter symbols. The machines with the most lines also usually have 5 reels (as opposed to 3 reels). When you play multi-payline slot machines, every coin you play will activate a line - yes, if you play a 25-line slot machine, you have to bet 25 coins to activate all 25 lines (which is also the number of coins you'll need to make you eligible for the biggest payout). If you get a winning combination of symbols on a line that you have not enabled, you will not win - that's something to consider when playing multi-line slots.

What all this means is that when you play multi-line slots you have a number of decisions to make before hitting the spin button. Once you've chosen your online slot machine, you have to decide how many lines you want to activate. When you've made that decision, you then have to decide how many coins to bet. If you're playing a dollar slot, each line will cost a minimum of a dollar but you can also bet up to 5 coins a line, i.e., up to 5 dollars.

Doing the math, if you're playing a 9-line $1.00 slot and you bet the maximum 5-coin bet on all the lines, your total bet will be 9 X $5.00 or $45.00 (which is not an inconsiderable bet, by the way). The maximum bet makes you eligible to win the maximum jackpot on the particular mulit-line slots game you have chosen.

Multi-line slots can potentially help you run through your bankroll in record time, but there are ways to slow down the process. Although making the maximum bet is usually the only road to the maximum slots jackpots, there are smaller payouts for smaller bets and, if your goal is to make your money last, you can just keep to smaller bets by either selecting a smaller coin or by betting on fewer lines or fewer coins per line. Playing a lower-denomination slot is also a good option. Fortunately, if you are playing slots online, the online casino will have many different slot machine games to choose from, each one only a mouse-click away. Either way, though, multi-line slots give you multi-options and multi-ways to have multi-hours of fun playing online slots.