A narrow opening; a groove, notch, slit, or aperture. Sports The space between the face-off circles on an ice hockey rink. Also called face-off hole. Informal A position or time in a sequence or schedule: She has a four-o’clock slot on Thursdays.

A slit or opening, especially one for receiving something: He dropped the coin in the slot.

In a slot machine, a payline is a specific combination of symbols that lines up horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or in a zigzag pattern for a payout. Different combinations have different payout values, which are listed in a machine’s pay table. Whether you choose to play classic or video slots, it’s important to read the pay table and understand the rules before you start playing.

In BigQuery, the scheduler ensures that each project with running queries receives an equal share of available slots. The scheduler may borrow additional slots from long-running jobs when they are evicted and can also preemptively allocate slots to reduce the frequency of future delays. This results in short periods when some jobs might receive a disproportionate share of slots, but the scheduler always provides eventual fairness. To minimize these fluctuations, you can use the ignore_idle_slots option to indicate that a reservation should only be allocated committed slots rather than unused ones. If you enable this option, you must configure your job scheduler to track and evict idle jobs when they finish. This will help keep your job queues small and improve overall system performance.