JILICC Hit frequency Explained — How Often a Game Pays Anything

A reasonable pick for the one term worth really understanding on a casino page is Hit frequency.

Hit frequency (also called hit rate) — What share of spins bring back any win, however small, is measured here, regardless of the total returned over time.

What Hit frequency actually means

Hit frequency is only a count of the fraction of played spins that pay something, including payouts smaller than the stake. Reel maths and the paytable of the game decide it together with RTP and volatility, although it is answering something different from each. The long-run total returned belongs to RTP, the distribution of that total between frequent-small and rare-large belongs to volatility, and hit frequency is only the rate at which reels stop on a winning combination of any kind.

A worked example

With a stated 25% hit frequency, a game returns something on roughly one spin in four, on average, across a large sample, leaving the other three with nothing. If the game’s RTP and volatility are both moderate, 400 spins should bring about 100 wins, mostly smaller than the stake. Whether the 100 wins in question add up to more or less than the stake is not addressed by that figure, and RTP is the number that does answer it.

The common misreading

Many players guess that a game paying out often must pay more, or be ‘looser’, since its hit frequency is high. It does not follow. The two figures can pull apart: a game hitting on 40% of spins may return only 90% since most hits are below the stake, and one hitting on 15% of spins may return 97% since it pays well when it hits. How big the total return gets is decided separately from how often a win comes.

Hit frequency stands apart from both RTP and volatility, however much comparison tables sometimes blur them into one ‘how good is this game’ impression. You can find a game that is high-hit-frequency and low-volatility, one that is high-hit-frequency and high-volatility, or any other combination, because the three numbers move independently and a full picture needs all of them.

Using it in practice

For a game with a low hit frequency, the visible dry spells run longer than its RTP alone suggests, which matters to how a session feels, though the long-run maths is unremarkable. To judge what a session will actually feel like, read hit frequency and RTP side by side wherever the studio publishes both, since either one alone tells you far less. Reading it with what rtp explained covers helps, since one clause usually carries all of them.

Game pages on this site use terms such as Hit frequency throughout, and when the studio publishes no figure behind one, the page says so and does not borrow a number from a comparison site. Blank cells in several of the spec tables on this page come down to exactly that.

Checking Hit frequency at JILICC

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