How to Play High Variance Slots Online

What the Label Means

High variance, or high volatility, describes the shape of a game's wins rather than their total value: wins are expected to arrive less often and to be larger when they do. In an online slot that shape is a property of the paytable and the reel maths.

Who Assigns the Label

The label belongs to the studio that built the game, because it comes out of the maths the studio designed. Whether the studio publishes it is a separate question, and often it does not: NetEnt's own game pages for Jungle Spirit: Call of the Wild, Dead or Alive, The Wish Master and Pyramid: Quest for Immortality carry a Volatility field with nothing in it, while ELK Studios publishes neither a volatility label nor an RTP for Hong Kong Tower. So for many titles there is no studio label to quote, and a volatility described anywhere else is somebody's reading of the game rather than the studio's statement about it. Evolution, which owns Big Time Gaming, describes that studio's titles including Bonanza, Extra Chilli, Lil Devil and Danger! High Voltage as having established a reputation for high-volatility gameplay. Push Gaming publishes a volatility rating on each of its own game pages alongside the game's mechanics. No regulator or testing laboratory publishes a volatility figure, there is no scale shared between studios, and no figure derived from playing a game for a few hundred spins would be meaningful, so the honest form of this value is a label with the name of whoever assigned it.

Variance and Return to Player Are Separate

Two games can carry the same return-to-player figure and behave entirely differently, because variance describes the distribution of outcomes and RTP describes their long-run average. The Gambling Commission's consumer guidance for Great Britain states that a return-to-player percentage is an average achieved over a significant number of game plays and not something achieved each time the game is played, and its guidance for licensing authorities puts the number of cycles a fully random game needs to converge on its stated figure in the order of a million or more. High variance means a session is further from that average, in either direction, than a low variance session would be.

A high variance label also implies nothing about the RTP of the version being played. Push Gaming states on its own game pages that the return to player of a title may vary per casino, and that the figure can be found in the game's user panel and on the loading screen. The figure that applies is the one shown in the game, at the operator where it is being played.

No Spin Is Ever Due

A long run without a win does not raise the chance of the next spin paying. The Commission's technical standards require that game results are acceptably random and prohibit adaptive behaviour, meaning automatic or manual interventions that change the probabilities of game outcomes occurring during play. The same standards prohibit games from falsely displaying near-miss results, so a sequence of close calls is not a signal about what comes next. Variance describes how wide the spread of results is; it does not create a pattern that can be read or used.

What a Player Can Actually Check

Before committing to a stake, the Commission's standards require that information enabling an informed decision about the chances of winning is easily available, in the form of the house edge, the return to player percentage, or the probability of winning events occurring, and that content describing the potential prizes and payouts is available too. For a high variance game the useful items in that information are the game's own RTP figure as shown in its help screen, its maximum win, and the cost of any bonus-buy or feature-buy option, since a wider spread of outcomes means a given bankroll funds fewer spins before it is exhausted. In Great Britain the stake per game cycle is capped and a game cycle may not be commenced less than 2.5 seconds after the previous one began, which applies to high variance games the same as to any other slot.