A slot is a position within a sequence or series. For example, the word slot is used to describe a particular position in a poker hand, or a place in line at an amusement park ride. It can also refer to a specific time of day or a certain date within a calendar.

A slots machine is a machine that pays out winning combinations of symbols when activated. The player inserts a coin or token into the machine and presses a button or pulls a lever to spin the reels. If the symbols line up on one of the paylines, the player receives a payout based on the size of their bet and the type of symbol.

Charles Fey’s invention of a mechanical slot machine made several significant changes to the earlier Sittman and Pitt invention. His machines allowed automatic payouts and had three reels. He replaced the traditional poker symbols with more familiar icons, including spades, hearts, horseshoes, and liberty bells—three aligned liberty bells became the highest jackpot, giving the game its name.

When you buy capacity for a slot pool, you assign it to jobs through reservations. A reservation is a grouping of jobs that share the same slots. For example, you can create a reservation named prod for production workloads and a reservation named test to allocate slots for testing. You can even assign a default reservation to make it easier to manage your slot pool.