10JILI Hit frequency Explained — How Often a Game Pays Anything

Casino pages use Hit frequency as a term all the time, yet hardly any of them bother to define it.

Hit frequency (also called hit rate) — The rate at which spins produce some win, however small, apart from the total paid back over time.

What Hit frequency actually means

Any spin that pays counts toward hit frequency, including payouts smaller than the stake, measured against every spin played. A different question from that of RTP or volatility is the one it answers, even though the paytable and reel maths of the game set all three. Hit frequency says nothing except how often the reels stop on a winning combination, while RTP is the long-run total returned and volatility is the way that total is distributed between frequent-small and rare-large.

The common misreading

Players often treat a high hit frequency as evidence that a game pays more or is ‘looser’. It does not follow. Hits on 40% of spins with only a 90% return overall is entirely possible when most hits are smaller than the stake, just as hits on 15% of spins with a 97% return is possible when hits pay well. Setting the frequency of a win does not set the size of the total return, and the reverse holds too.

Hit frequency measures something other than RTP and volatility, although a comparison table may fold the three into one ‘how good is this game’ impression. Because the three numbers move independently, a game can be high-hit-frequency with low volatility, with high volatility, or in some other combination, and a complete view takes all three.

A worked example

If the game states a 25% hit frequency, then about one spin out of four returns something over a large sample, on average, and the other three come back empty. Take 400 spins: around 100 would win, and the majority would likely be worth less than the stake if the RTP and volatility of the game are both moderate. That figure leaves open whether those 100 wins total more or less than was staked; RTP is the number that settles it.

Using it in practice

Dry spells are longer and more visible in a game with a low hit frequency than its RTP alone suggests, and this affects the feel of a session even when the long-run maths is unremarkable. When hit frequency appears next to RTP in a studio’s published figures, use both: together they describe a session much better than either number alone. Keep it in mind next to what rtp explained means, which the same pages usually bring up in the same breath.

You will meet terms such as Hit frequency throughout this site’s game pages; if a studio keeps the figure behind one private, the page tells you that and leaves out any number lifted from a comparison site. Blank cells turn up in more than one spec table on this page for exactly that reason.

Checking Hit frequency at 10JILI

1. Open a game at 10JILI and find its info or help screen.
2. Locate Hit frequency in that place and read it against the definition above.
3. Compare it with the same entry on another title before you pick one to play at 10JILI.
4. Write your stake and your stop point down before the first round at 10JILI.