Hit Rates: More Than Just a Theory

Normal Game Hit Rates

Every player has gone through those runs where they just can’t seem to hit a feature, or just can’t seem to get a good pay during normal play to tide them over till the run changes.

It happens, and it’s frustrating as all hell, and often leads to thoughts that “oh my god, the casino has switched me off…they’ve hit the magic no win button…”

But ruling out buggy random number generators or software of ill repute, the answer usually lies in the mathematics of the game.

A win of 100 times the line bet is a rule-of-thumb gauge that I often use to judge a decent win. On a 20 line game playing say 5c a game, this is at least a $5 hit. Not much, but keeps you in the game if you can hit a few.

Even at a 1 in 50 spin average hit rate (1 in 1000 on single line) for a win of such a scale this would consume 10% of the total RTP of the game. Since this general guide includes wins well above the 100 times level, the total RTP at such a hit rate is often 20-25% of the total RTP. Drop that to 1 in 800 on a single line and you’re looking at 25-30%.

Go much beyond that and the game isn’t going to have much percentage to do much else with and you’ll end up with a pretty harsh gaming experience.

Now that means that you are going to go substantial periods during which “large” wins such as these do not make an appearance. Over 36% of the time of this 1 in 50 example you’ll go 50 spins without seeing a win of this type come up. You’ve got about a 1 in 7.5 chance of going 100 spins without a hit of this type.

Bad runs happen. Fortunately, so do good ones.

Feature Hit Rates

In truly random games there is no correlation between a winning event from one game to the next (ignoring items such as features triggered during game play).

Players often think that a game that has not hit a feature or significant win over a prolonged period is “overdue”.
However the chances of hitting a win of a particular type do not vary from one spin to the next. You have exactly the same probability of hitting a feature on your 1st spin on a slot as you do on your 120th.

If, however, you look at the entire series beforehand and say: I’m due to hit the feature within 120 spins (for instance), your probably correct, the odds of hitting something over that period are high. However, if you go 120 spins with nothing, the chance of hitting on spin 121 are the same as hitting it on any other spin throughout the period you just played.

There are many, many occasions when you’re going to go through several hundred spins on a standard slot game without hitting a feature event.

Most features have an average chance to trigger of between 1 in 100 and 1 in 140.

Odds that you’re going to hit a feature at the extremes of this range would look something like:

On more volatile, less frequently triggering feature games the odds of getting a bad run are actually pretty high. Even a feature that triggers quite often is going to burn a player every now and then.

I think my record for an atrocious run without a feature was a little over 1400 spins on an Aristocrat machine…boy did that slam me. Very frustrating, but it will happen…just as triggering features in successive spins will happen…it comes down to luck.