LARO77 Hit frequency Explained — How Often a Game Pays Anything

Most of the confusion around Hit frequency comes from the loose reading of a term that has a precise meaning.

Hit frequency (also called hit rate) — How often a spin returns any win at all, even a tiny one, irrespective of what is returned in total over time.

What Hit frequency actually means

A simple count defines hit frequency, namely the fraction of spins played that land a payout of any size, even one below the stake. The paytable and reel maths of the game set it, together with RTP and volatility, but the question it answers differs from both. Hit frequency says only how often the reels stop on any winning combination whatsoever, volatility says how the total is distributed between frequent-small and rare-large, and RTP says what total is returned in the long run.

Using it in practice

Even when the long-run maths is unremarkable, a low hit frequency makes a game produce longer visible dry spells than its RTP alone suggests, which affects how a session feels. When a studio publishes hit frequency next to RTP, looking at the pair gives a far better picture of the actual feel of a session than one figure on its own. Read it next to the rtp explained entry, since a page that explains one nearly always explains the others.

Game pages across this site lean on Hit frequency constantly, and when a studio leaves the number behind it unpublished, the page states that plainly rather than borrowing a figure off a comparison site. Blank cells in several of the spec tables below come down to exactly this.

The common misreading

People often take a high hit frequency to mean that a game pays more, or is ‘looser’. It does not follow. Hitting on 40% of spins can still mean a 90% overall return when most of those hits are smaller than the stake; a game that hits on 15% of spins can return 97% because its hits pay well. The size of the total return is set separately from how frequently a win occurs.

Hit frequency is a separate thing from RTP and volatility, even though some comparison tables merge the three into a single ‘how good is this game’ impression. Any combination is possible, including high-hit-frequency with low-volatility or high-hit-frequency with high-volatility, because the three numbers move independently and only all of them give a full picture.

A worked example

Across a large sample, a game with a stated 25% hit frequency pays on about one spin out of every four on average — the other three pay nothing. If the game’s RTP and volatility are both moderate, 400 spins would produce around 100 winning spins, most of them probably smaller than the stake. RTP is the number that answers whether those 100 wins total more or less than was staked, which that figure says nothing about.

Checking Hit frequency at LARO77

1. Open a game at LARO77 and find its info or help screen.
2. Find Hit frequency in that spot and interpret it with the definition given earlier.
3. Compare it with the same entry on another title before you pick one to play at LARO77.
4. Write your stake and your stop point down before the first round at LARO77.