My name is Sonya A. Taylor, and if you've ever scrolled through a casino forum at 3 a.m. m. looking for an honest answer about which slot actually pays, chances are you've already stumbled across one of my rants. I was born in 1994 in Birmingham, Alabama-the one with the giant Vulcan statue, not the British one. My mom was a waitress at the dog track in VictoryLand, so Friday nights meant falling asleep to the sound of greyhounds barking and mechanical reels spinning on the other side of a thin wall. I could recite the payout tables on the old IGT Game Kings before I could spell my last name properly.
I was a weird kid who collected slot-club cards instead of Pokmon cards and spent my allowance on quarters for the Skill Stop machines at the truck stop. By fifteen, I was already sneaking into the charity bingo halls with a fake ID that said I was twenty-three and named Brandy.
I left Alabama the day after high-school graduation with a full-ride academic scholarship to Georgia Tech, where I studied Industrial Engineering because someone has to design the machines that rob us, might as well be me. I graduated in 2016, took one look at the cubicle farms waiting for me, said hell no, and moved to Las Vegas with two suitcases and a $3,000 bankroll Id built playing micro-stakes online slots during lectures.
I then spent the next five years doing the strangest jobs in the industry: I was a slot tech on the Strip-yes, I'm the one who fixed your machine when it "malfunctioned" and ate your free-play-then a game mathematician for a small white-label studios, then a streamer showing actual losses, not fabricated wins. People hated and loved it all at once.
In 2021, I went fully independent and started BestSlotsList.com, originally just a Google Sheet in which I tracked every new release's real RTP, hit frequency, and max exposure after 100,000 tracked spins. The sheet turned into the biggest English-language database of verified slot stats on the planet, and now I run the whole site as editor-in-chief and lead commentator.
I still live in Vegas, Summerlin side, because I'm thirty-one and my back hurts, in a house with blackout curtains and three monitors that never turn off. My job is to play every new slot for thousands of spins with my own money, tear apart the paytables, expose fake "up to 95 % RTP" claims, and rank them brutally honestly so you know whether Megaways Xtreme 3000 is actually worth your time or just another 6 % house-edge skin.
I speak Southern English, casino legalese and profanity all with equal skill. I don't drink energy drinks, I drink sweet tea strong enough to strip paint. I still chase progressive jackpots for fun but I'll be the first to tell you the world they're mathematically stupid.
I don't care about affiliate commissions. I care about data, transparency, and making sure the next kid from Alabama who grows up smelling cigarette smoke and dreaming of a big hit at least knows the real odds before she clicks "spin."
