For all of those who had an "almost".
If you understand how the machines are programmed, you would see that a non-winning position on the screen could be filled by anything. On a mechanical machine, "near misses" were actual.
On a mechanical machine, if there were only one jackpot symbol one each of the three reels, the jackpot would pay 8,000:1 at true odds (20 x 20 x 20). The only way to increase the jackpot would be to add reels. For a four reel machine with one jackpot symbol on each reel, the true odds would be 160,000:1
There was a "breakthrough" by
Inge S. Telnaes (the filed a patent US4448419 in 1984 for it) in which they could map more symbols per reel. On a machine that used 256 symbols per each of the three reels, if there were only on Jackpot symbol on each of the three reels, the jackpot odds would rise to 16,777,216:1 (256 x 256 x 256)
On a video machine, you could program "any" symbol to be above or below the payline. Since the position is not "actionable", what you put there is irrelevant.
On a "reel" slot machine, it's a little trickier, in that if you "wanted" to make more "near misses" occur, you would need to have a jackpot symbol one above or one below each symbol on the reel.
A slot machine's only function is to display the PRNG's output on the screen.
From the Wizard of Odds:
. . . I asked a well connected gaming consultant and he said Nevada regulations state that one stop on a reel can not be weighted more than six times more than either stop next to it. So if a jackpot symbol were weighted by 1 and both bordering blanks were weighted by 6 then there would be 12 near misses for every one time the reel stopped on the jackpot symbol. This would be the maximum allowed near miss effect. My own results detailed in my
slot machine appendix 1 back up this theory well. The red double seven was the highest paying symbol and I saw the blanks above and below it about 5 to 6 times as often:
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Hope this didn't affect anyone's affinity or aversion to slot machines.
Hit this at the Palazzo a couple of days ago. Too bad I wasn't betting max. Got $300 instead of the $385k progressive. Made me wonder if it was the universe's way of telling me I'm never gonna hit the big one, ever. I wanted to quit playing slots after that, but as my hubby says, I'm easily distracted by shiny objects so that only lasted a couple of minutes 
