BigBunny Hit frequency Explained — How Often a Game Pays Anything

Hit frequency is a term that shows up on every casino page and almost none of them explain it.

Hit frequency (also called hit rate) — Share of spins that pay out anything whatsoever, however small, whatever the overall amount returned across time.

What Hit frequency actually means

Counting is all hit frequency involves: of all spins played, it asks which fraction produce a payout of any size, including one below the stake. Together with RTP and volatility it comes from the game’s paytable and reel maths, yet it addresses a question distinct from both of them. Hit frequency covers only how often the reels land on any winning combination whatsoever, whereas RTP covers the long-run total returned and volatility covers how that total divides between frequent-small and rare-large.

A worked example

A stated hit frequency of 25% means that across a large sample about one spin in four pays something on average, and the remaining three pay nothing. Across 400 spins, that works out at about 100 winners, and when the game’s RTP and volatility are both moderate most of them are probably smaller than the stake. Whether those 100 wins total more or less than the amount staked is not something that figure tells you, as RTP is the number that covers it.

Using it in practice

Visible dry spells run longer than RTP alone would suggest in a game with a low hit frequency, and that shapes how a session feels even if the long-run maths is unremarkable. Either number alone says less about what a session will actually feel like than the two read together, where a studio publishes hit frequency next to RTP. Pairing it with what rtp explained means makes it stick, since the same pages tend to mention them together.

The game pages on this site keep returning to terms such as Hit frequency; if a studio leaves the figure behind one unpublished, the page tells you so rather than lifting a number off a comparison site. For that reason, a number of spec tables here have empty fields.

The common misreading

Many assume a high hit frequency means that a game is ‘looser’ or pays more. It does not follow. One game may land a win on 40% of spins yet return just 90% overall since most of the wins fall below the stake, while another may win on only 15% of spins and still return 97% because its wins pay well. The setting of how often wins occur is separate from the setting of how much is returned in total.

Comparison tables sometimes merge the three into one ‘how good is this game’ impression, but hit frequency is neither RTP nor volatility. The three numbers move independently, so high hit frequency can sit beside low volatility, beside high volatility, or in any other pairing, and only all of them together give a full picture.

Checking Hit frequency at BigBunny

1. Open a game at BigBunny and find its info or help screen.
2. Find Hit frequency there and let the definition above tell you how to read it.
3. Before choosing a title at BigBunny, set the same entry beside another title’s and compare.
4. Before the first round at BigBunny, put your stake and your stop point in writing.