For many players, the concept of buying a bonus is still a relatively new one. While we’ve talked about aspects of it in the past, here’s a couple of recent questions that ask some new elements.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Buying a Bonus trend. Is it a fool’s bet like the big wheels that many casinos used to have or legit? In my own experience (20 spins) I had one 5x win resulting in a W2G, a handful of spins where I essentially broke even and 15 partial to near total losses. Have you seen better upside than what I experienced?
Scott T.
First off, as we shared earlier, it’s legit and has a return to player (RTP) that aligns with that the machine’s set to provide over time.
But the thing to remember is that the cost of buying a bonus is based on the average performance of the bonus and a house edge baked in, so you aren’t likely to see 1,000x bonuses against their purchase price.
What would be a 1,000x bonus on an individual $1 spin would look like a 20x bonus on a $50 buy a bonus bet for that same bet level, because the outcome is still based on a $1 spin, not on the $50 you spent to automatically get that bonus.
So a 5x win compared to the cost of buying the bonus is good – really good, in fact!
To answer your question about whether we’ve seen better, we sure have. Here’s an example from Coin Trio Piggy Burst on a minimum bet $35 bonus buy at a 60 cent per spin bet level. We got the Minor on the opening six coins, and the Major on a subsequent coin, so we got just shy of $1,000 on a $35 buy a bonus.
If it had been an organically triggered bonus, it would have been more than 1,500x the 60 cent bet! Instead, at a $35 buy a bonus, it’s more like 28x the bonus buy amount. That’s why you have to look at it through the lens of what the organic price would be, because your $35 entry fee is effectively reflecting how long it’d take on average to get there doing normal spins.
One 28x win would more than cover your 20x attempts, not even accounting for the various partial wins and break events you’d naturally get from bonus buys along the way. So that hopefully helps show the potential.
If you buy a bonus on machines that allow it, does that change the odds of getting the bonus by spinning it?
Danny M.
The existence of a bonus buy option itself won’t have any impact on the odds of getting the bonus, but the price of getting a bonus can be a hint as to the game’s bonus frequency, as the higher the price, the more value is found in that bonus, and inversely the less frequently the bonus could occur for that value to be potentially unlocked.
The bonus frequency, and the average bonus award when getting that bonus, is part of the calculus that makes a slot a slot. We know of games that love to bonus and offer smaller payouts, and we know games that have tougher to obtain bonuses with more potential upside when you do get them.
The buy a bonus itself doesn’t tend to factor into that calculus per se, but its price can help reflect what potential is in the bonus, and in turn help players get an idea of how difficult it is to bonus.
But since not all the money found in a slot is found in a bonus, it’s only a rough guideline – games with more money in the bonus may bonus more frequently because there’s no line hit money to pay out alongside it. But generally if a bonus is more juicy, it’ll be harder to achieve than ones where the bonus is less lucrative.
With that in mind, if you like an easier to achieve bonus (which in turn makes it more affordable to buy), check out some examples of more affordable buy a bonus options you can find on legal online casinos you can play for real money.
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Can you list some of the slot machines that offer the “buy a bonus” feature? My play is usually limited to the various Huff-N-Puff and Planet Moolah variations, so I was unaware that this feature even existed. Thanks
Hi Larry – check out our article on slots on which you can buy a bonus for some examples!