A five-reel slot has five reels, typically with three or four rows. It is the standard layout for video slots and the most common format online.
Five reels give designers room for many paylines, commonly 10 to 50, or ways to win: 243 on a 5x3 grid and 1,024 on a 5x4 grid. Wins usually need at least three matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left, with bigger prizes for four and five of a kind.
Most features are designed around this layout, such as expanding wilds on reels two to four or scatters on specific reels. Newer formats push beyond five reels, with six-reel Megaways and larger grid slots.