What Makes a Slot "Volatile," Explained Without the Jargon

Whether you’re playing on a phone or a computer, on an Apple or a Samsung, slot volatility is one of the words you'll always see come up if you're playing slot games. You might not see it advertised all the time, but it's one of the metrics you will see if you go into the slot paytable, usually in the help or information section.

Below is a beginner's guide to slot volatility that cuts through the jargon and gives you the information you need.

A Beginner's Explanation of Slot Volatility

Slot volatility isn't too technical. It's essentially telling you how a slot at a site like Buusti Kasino can pay out and how the size of the wins can vary. 

So, a low-volatility slot will produce smaller wins, but more regularly, and it's the opposite for high-volatility slots. You might play for longer without much happening, and can potentially win bigger if you do win. Medium volatility sits between the two, but you'll rarely see a slot listed as a medium-volatility slot. You're best thinking about volatility as the amount of ups and downs you could experience while playing.

Medium-volatility slots obviously sit somewhere between the two.

It's probably easiest to think about volatility as the amount of ups and downs you could experience while playing. The higher the volatility, the more uneven things can feel from one spin to another or across a whole session.

That said, a high-volatility slot won't behave exactly the same from game to game. It's more of a general indication of how prizes are distributed within the game in terms of how many you may or may not get.

Does Volatility Impact Gaming Session Outcomes?

It doesn't necessarily change gaming session outcomes from game to game, but it can definitely change how a gaming session feels and sometimes how quickly your balance moves up or down. But a lot of that is because of the other metrics, especially return to player, which is the amount of money paid back to players represented as a percentage.

So, if two slots have the same RTP and one is low volatility and the other is high volatility, on the first game, you could see lots of small wins that keep returning part of your stake. In the high-volatility game, there may be longer stretches without a sizable win, then by the chance of something much larger.=

So, even though their theoretical RTP might be identical, your experience over 50 or 100 spins could look completely different.

And that's the important part. RTP is calculated over a huge number of spins, not over your individual session. There's no way of knowing whether a bigger win is about to appear just because you've had a long run without one.

So volatility won't tell you what the result of that particular session will be.

Should You Use Slot Volatility to Pick a Game?

Realistically, it would make more sense to use volatility as a piece of information rather than your reason for choosing a game to play.

Some people prefer lots of smaller wins because they like something happening fairly regularly. Others would rather have fewer wins if there's the possibility of a larger payout when one eventually lands. Neither type of slot is automatically better.

Volatility can also be useful when comparing two games that otherwise look quite similar. If one is rated low and another high, you already know they're probably going to feel very different even if the themes, paylines or RTP figures are close. Just don't treat volatility as a prediction tool.

That's the basics of volatility. There's not much more to it than thinking of the ups and downs during the game and how predictable a slot's short-term payouts are. To learn more about how slot game mechanics work, you should look at RTP and hit frequency.