Slot terms, in plain words
- RTP
- Return to player. The share of all money bet that a game pays back, averaged over an enormous number of spins. 96.5% means that across millions of spins the game returns $96.50 per $100 staked. It is not a prediction about your session, and it is always below 100%.
- Hit rate
- How often a spin pays anything at all. A 30% hit rate means roughly three spins in ten pay something — including the ones that pay back less than you bet. Providers generally don't publish this; we measure it.
- Wins smaller than the bet
- Also called a loss disguised as a win. The reels line up, the sound plays, coins fly — and you get back 40 cents of your dollar. It's recorded as a win by the game and felt as a win by the player. It is a loss. On some slots most "wins" are this.
- Free-spins frequency
- How often the free-spins round actually triggers, written as 1 in X spins. It takes a few hundred real triggers to measure this accurately, which is why it's the slowest number to pin down.
- Max win
- The hard cap on what one spin can pay, as a multiple of your bet. A 5,000x cap means the game stops at 5,000 times your stake no matter what the reels do.
- Max win odds
- How many spins the maximum win takes on average, from the game's own maths. Numbers like 1 in 5,494,505 are common — at one spin every three seconds that is well over a year of non-stop spinning.
- 1 in X
- Our notation for frequency. "1 in 400" means it happens on average once every 400 spins — not every 400th spin. Four hundred spins with nothing, then two in a row, is perfectly normal.
- Volatility
- How wildly results swing. Providers give it as low/medium/high; we measure the actual spread of payouts per spin. High volatility means long dry stretches punctuated by rare big hits, even when the RTP is identical to a calmer game.
- Margin of error
- How far a measured number could still be from the truth, given how many spins it's based on. "97.2% ± 15.5" means the real figure is probably somewhere between about 82% and 113%. A number published without this is a number you can't use.
- Drought
- The run of spins since the last free-spins trigger. People watch it because they think a long drought makes a trigger more likely. It doesn't — see the hot-slot experiment.
- Demo mode
- The provider's own free version of a game, playable without an account or a deposit. It runs the provider's default maths, which is what makes it measurable. A casino may run a different configuration.
- Ante bet
- An option to pay extra per spin (often 25% more) in exchange for free spins triggering more often. It usually comes with a slightly different RTP, listed separately where the game publishes it.
Figures as of 2026-10-06 10:48 UTC