A thin opening or groove in something, often used for inserting objects. A slot can also refer to a position in a group, series, or sequence of things: the slot for a book review was filled; her story got the top slot in the newspaper.
In football, a player who lines up slightly in the backfield off of the line of scrimmage is a Slot receiver. Unlike Outside wide receivers, who typically have a variety of routes they can run, Slot receivers tend to specialize in one or two specific ones. Their pre-snap alignment often dictates their route running, but they are also required to have advanced blocking skills because of the way they have to work with other offensive players.
The term slot is also used in the context of data management and analytics, specifically for describing the allocation of resources for processing queries by a database. With central flow management, databases allocate slots to queues of queries according to their size and complexity, allowing them to process requests as quickly as possible.
On video slot machines, a pay table lists the payout values and their probabilities for each coin or credit bet. It is important to note that the probability for a given payout value on any particular reel is not necessarily what appears in the paytable, as the manufacturer can determine how many coins (or credits) a machine will return over a selected timeframe (usually 1 hr to 30 days). POP and RTP are the statistics that tell you how much a slot is likely to return over its lifetime.