PH365 Volatility Meaning: Variance and What It Costs
Volatility (also called variance): Whether a game pays back through frequent small wins or through infrequent large ones.
- Term
- Volatility
- Short for
- also called variance
- Set by
- Decided by the game studio when it wrote the paytable and reel maths
- Where you meet it
- Game spec tables, where the entry is typically a label and not a figure
- Not the same as
- Risk in the everyday sense is something else; volatility is also no gauge of whether a game is fair. Calling high volatility rigged, or low volatility safe, gets it wrong; over time both return the same share. Nor does it equal hit frequency, though related; the latter counts how frequently something comes back and volatility describes how large it is.
Volatility is a fair pick if you want to understand one casino page term properly.
Volatility (also called variance) — Whether a game pays back through frequent small wins or through infrequent large ones.
What Volatility actually means
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Term | Volatility |
| Written out | also called variance |
| In one line | Whether a game pays back through frequent small wins or through infrequent large ones. |
| Fixed by | Decided by the game studio when it wrote the paytable and reel maths |
| Where you meet it | Game spec tables, where the entry is typically a label and not a figure |
It is the shape of the outcomes that volatility describes, not their sum. An identical RTP does not make two games feel alike: low-volatility slots give frequent small payouts, whereas high-volatility slots pay infrequently and in large amounts. Over time the return in the two cases may well be identical. Comparisons leave it out more than any other property, though it is the most useful one for matching a game with a bankroll.
Using it in practice
Surviving the dry spells that its maths guarantees takes a deep bankroll when a game is high volatility. Whatever the advertised ceiling, a session budget that cannot take eighty losing spins without ending does not suit a high-volatility game. Keep it beside what bankroll management means, since a page that explains one nearly always covers the others.
Across the game pages on this site you will meet terms like Volatility, and wherever the studio leaves out the figure behind one, the page states that instead of quoting a number from a comparison site. So a number of the spec tables here show no value in places.
A worked example
Consider two games both returning 96%.
On roughly one spin in three, the low-volatility game might return a bit, and mostly less than the stake. Nothing may come back for eighty spins on the high-volatility one, and then it could pay two hundred times the stake. Over a million spins the two converge. Three hundred spins in one evening give them completely different experiences along with completely different bankroll requirements.
The common misreading
‘Pays more’ tends to be the reading given to high volatility. The total is not higher: payments come less often and are larger, and that lengthens the losing runs between them. A 10,000x ceiling on a high-volatility game is no sign of generosity, merely a return moved into an outcome most players will never see.
Risk in the everyday sense is something else; volatility is also no gauge of whether a game is fair. Calling high volatility rigged, or low volatility safe, gets it wrong; over time both return the same share. Nor does it equal hit frequency, though related; the latter counts how frequently something comes back and volatility describes how large it is.
Checking Volatility at PH365
- At PH365, open a game and look for its info or help screen.
- Watch for Volatility there, and interpret it with the definition above.
- Before choosing which title to play at PH365, set it against the same entry on another title.
- Before the first round at PH365, write down your stake and your stop point.
Related terms defined here
FAQ
What do people get wrong about Volatility?
'Pays more' tends to be the reading given to high volatility. The total is not higher: payments come less often and are larger, and that lengthens the losing runs between them. A 10,000x ceiling on a high-volatility game is no sign of generosity, merely a return moved into an outcome most players will never see.
What does Volatility mean?
Whether a game pays back through frequent small wins or through infrequent large ones.
When choosing a game, how much weight should Volatility get?
Surviving the dry spells that its maths guarantees takes a deep bankroll when a game is high volatility. Whatever the advertised ceiling, a session budget that cannot take eighty losing spins without ending does not suit a high-volatility game.