If you are unaware of the meaning of high volatility or high variance it basically is a measurement of the chance of receiving a return/win from your chosen slot. The term high variance. Play high variance slots at great casinos. Below, you'll find our list of online casinos offering a great selection of high variance slots. Mind that casinos generally don't sort the games by variance so you need to know what you're looking for. Or, you can learn about the variance of slots on this page and decide on the right casino afterwards. High Volatility Slots Higher volatility equates to higher risk. Because payouts, while larger, are fewer and farther between, you can sometimes end up clicking the 'spin' button, watching your balance dwindle, with not a lot to show for it. That is, until everything lines up perfectly and bam! Volatility standard deviation (SD), risk – The standard deviation is the most commonly used index of volatility. Highly volatile games will present rare but large prizes, whereas a low volatility game will award smaller prizes, but they will occur more often. Highly volatile slots are less predictable.

The biggest trend in online gaming involves highly volatile slots. I often see reviews praising a game that features a 9/10 or 10/10 volatility rating.

I’m not quite sure when high volatility became a universally great thing. The gaming experts and players have apparently spoken, though.

Why is insane volatility the “in” thing these days? I’ll discuss more on volatile slots along with why players love them.

How Does Volatility Impact Slots?

Volatility impacts real money online slots in a few key ways. You should know what you’re getting into before choosing the most-volatile games.

Affects Hit Frequency

Hit frequency refers to how often you can expect to win per round. Some developers actually provide a figure in the info section, such as 25% hit frequency.

Higher win frequency will lead to more overall payouts in a session. Depending upon the type of player you are, you may enjoy winning over and over again.

Volatile slot machines don’t usually offer high hit frequency. A game with a 9/10 or 10/10 rating doesn’t typically see you win more than 20% of the time.

High volatility slots are slots that have a large difference between the minimum and maximum win amounts. The bigger the jackpots that are promised, the higher you.

Alters Bankroll Management Strategies

Highest Volatility Slots

You should always have a set budget that you’re willing to play slots with. A budget, or bankroll, helps ensure that you don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose.

In following responsible bankroll management, you can only bet so much in one session or series of sessions.

Highly volatile slots make it difficult to stretch your money further. You’ll either be dealing with a slot that offers low win frequency or doesn’t pay much when it does deliver wins.

You probably won’t feel the effects of these problems with a big bankroll. However, you normally won’t last long if you have a small roll.

Increases Big Win Potential

Here we come to the big payoff: volatile slots are more likely to deliver bonuses and huge wins. These games may not pay often, but they offer larger top prizes than the average game.

If you’re looking for jackpot-type payouts, then you’ll appreciate such slots. You may also trigger more features in these games too.

Why Do Players Love Volatile Slots?

Volatile games won’t hand out prizes left and right. But they do offer a few key benefits that make them extremely popular.

More Features

These days, slots players love lots of action. They want winning combinations exploding (a.k.a. avalanche), animations all over the place, and the potential for many features.

The latter refer to bonuses, such as free spins, respins, expanding wilds, and win multipliers. More available features can lead to bigger payouts and more overall excitement.

The most-volatile slots offer several features. You may even see multiple features in one bonus round too, such as free spins with avalanche, expanding wilds, and a win multiplier.

Bigger Wins

Slots players have been chasing big jackpots since the mid-1900s. Nothing has changed in this regard, because gamblers still like games with serious payout potential.

High volatility normally equates to a large maximum win. An explosive game can pay anywhere from 10,000x to 100,000x your stake (or more).

Of course, you may need to place higher bets to win serious money from these wins. But you’ll find the risk worth the reward if you ever do collect a 50,000x prize, for example.

More Winning Opportunities

Earlier, I mentioned that volatile games don’t usually offer high win frequency. They can, however, give you more opportunities to win in each round.

How is this the case, though? Here are some ways that volatile slots can offer more chances to win:

• Avalanche – Symbols from winning combinations vanish and new icons take their places.
• Expanding wild – Spreads wild symbols across an entire reel.
• Megaways – Can offer up to 117,649 ways to win (or more).
• More rows – Some games add additional rows (and ways) when certain conditions are met.

Nothing guarantees that these features will lead to high hit frequency. However, they increase the chances of you netting big wins in rounds.

Why Gamblers Should Be Wary of Volatile Games

Huge payouts and more action sound like a great combination in slots. However, you still need to be careful with these games due to the following reasons.

More Dry Spells

Nobody likes experiencing lengthy losing streaks. Unfortunately, volatile slots increase the odds of you going for long stretches without wins.

Even a Megaways slot with avalanche payouts may see you go several rounds without a single payout. You’ll typically find that 117,649 ways, or so, don’t mean much per round.

It helps when you have a big enough bankroll to survive dry spells. Even still, you won’t appreciate those periods when a volatile game fails to deliver a prize for several consecutive spins.

Your Bankroll Doesn’t Stretch as Far

I suggest waiting until you have a large bankroll before playing slots with 10/10 volatility ratings. Otherwise, you won’t get much play from your funds.

What Does High Volatility Mean In Slots Games

High volatility games present problems on one or both of the following fronts:

The first dilemma forces you to suffer through more dry spells. The second problem will see you rack up lots of nickel and dime payouts that don’t do much to cover your overall spin costs.

You may get lucky and stretch your $50 bankroll over the course of many sessions. More likely, though, you won’t get much play out of a small bankroll when dealing with volatile slots.

Most Wins Aren’t Life Changing

Extreme volatility doesn’t necessarily indicate life-changing money. A slot with a 20,000x maximum payout sounds enticing, but the win potential is relative to your bet size.

Sure, you can risk $100 per spin and win $2 million with the maximum prize in this case. The key problem, though, is that you’re betting $100 each round.

What if you scale your wager back to $1, though? You can win $20,000 at the top range, which is a nice prize. However, you can only retire early with this amount when living in the poorest countries.

Why High Volatility Will Remain Popular in Gaming

You can see that slots with insane volatile aren’t entirely perfect. They don’t see you win often and may not even deliver the life-changing money that makes them worth the effort.

The downsides make me question why every slots reviewer acts like high volatility is such a great thing. Volatility isn’t a trait that every player appreciates.

Some gamblers don’t want to see their money vanish within minutes during a bad session. Instead, they’d like to stretch their $20 to $40 for 1-2 hours or longer.

Of course, games with high volatility aren’t popular due to their incredible risk. They’re popular because of what they bring to the table.

A volatile game normally includes several features, a big maximum payout, and more opportunities to win.

You probably aren’t actually going to win big when playing an online slot. However, you’ll appreciate when the potential to do so is there.

The features are what really drive the success of highly volatile slots. They ensure that you have chances to earn serious money and, at the very least, experience lots of action.

Most players are entertained by exploding payouts, expanding symbols, and unique bonuses. Therefore, they appreciate volatile slots that can deliver these elements.

Conclusion

I don’t think that slots reviewers should necessarily use high volatility as a defining point for quality slots. After all, more volatility creates more difficulty in managing your bankroll and winning at slots.

However, volatile games offer what modern slots players want. They feature the prospect of huge wins and several bonuses.

You’re simply going to experience more entertainment when playing these games. You’ll see a lot going on the screen at once due to the various features.

Of course, you still may not want to play a 10/10 volatility slot due to the high risk. But you might be comfortable with games that have an 8/10 rating, for example.

Before you play any online slot game, you need to find out as much as you can about it. This includes its RTP value and how volatile it is – its volatility level. But what do these things mean? Understanding them is the first step towards figuring out which is most important, and how you relate to the information when deciding which games to play.

What does volatility mean?

Some slots are far more volatile than others. All slots should show their volatility level somewhere. In some cases, you may need to research this online, but it is usually quite simple to find the answer. The lower the level, the easier it is to pick up prizes during the game. That sounds cool… so why doesn’t everyone go for lower volatility levels? The reason for this is that low volatility slots pay out more often, yet those prizes tend to be smaller because of this. Conversely, higher volatility games offer the chance to collect several big prizes in quick succession. However, you pay for that with the real possibility of spinning the reels for ages and never winning a thing. So, an element of risk comes into play here. That means you need to think about what your own risk level is like. Do you prefer to take a bigger risk in exchange for a chance at a bigger reward? Would you prefer to stick with a safer game and have a chance of collecting plenty of smaller prizes more regularly? This is the trade off you need to think about whenever you play.

What does RTP mean?

To work out how this affects our game choice, we need to know what RTP stands for. The answer is return to player. It’s always a percentage and it should always be as high as possible. For example, let’s suppose we have two slot games to choose from. One has an RTP of 95.5% while the other offers an RTP of 98%. If all other elements were equal, we’d choose the 98% RTP. That’s because the game will return 98% of all monies taken in bets, compared with 95.5% for the other game. It's vital to remember that these percentages are worked out over the life of the game though. This could be many years long. It doesn’t mean you’re going to get back that percentage of the wagers you place on the game, whether it’s in that session or over two or three sessions.

What Is Volatility In Slots

Which one matters more?

They both do. Each one refers to a different aspect of the game. you always need to figure out what your own preference is about volatility. Some people never go for anything more than a low volatility slot, yet others sit at the opposite end of the risk scale. This element of a slot bears no relation to the RTP. That’s why you need to think about the two things separately. We think they are of equal importance. We always look for slots with the highest RTP we can find, since they give out more in prizes than other slots. It’s that simple. We also prefer lower volatility slots, but others might differ on that.

Know where you stand before you play

What Does High Volatility Mean In Slots Free

You’ve guessed this by now, we’re sure. Whenever you see a slot game you haven’t played before, find out what you can about these two values. You should know what your targets are and whether you prefer a low or high volatility level, or something that sits between the two. Once you have that information, you can choose your next slot game to play with more confidence.