A slot is a narrow opening or groove, often used to hold something such as a coin or disk. It is also a term used in computer programming to refer to a specific memory location, often called an expansion slot. A slot can also refer to the space in a schedule or program where an activity can take place. For example, a visitor can book a time slot a week or more in advance. The word can also mean the action of putting something into the space where it fits, such as a CD into a CD player or a car seat belt into the buckle.

Progressive jackpots in casinos are a great example of this. These jackpots swell until one lucky player wins the entire pool, which is usually several million dollars or more. These jackpots are often not linked to any other machines, but to the game in which they are played.

Many players try to beat the odds of a particular slot machine by paying close attention to the results of previous spins. However, this isn’t a practical strategy because the random number generator inside each slot doesn’t take into account what happened before or after the current spin.

When you purchase and assign slots, you create pools known as reservations. You can assign jobs to these pools based on different criteria, such as capacity or job type. For example, you can create a reservation named prod for production workloads and another reserved for testing to ensure that test jobs don’t compete with resources needed for production workloads.