PH90 Hit frequency Explained — How Often a Game Pays Anything

If one term on a casino page is worth understanding properly, Hit frequency is a reasonable candidate.

Hit frequency (also called hit rate) — The share of spins giving back a win of any size at all, irrespective of what comes back in total over time.

What Hit frequency actually means

Field	Value
Term	Hit frequency
Written out	also called hit rate
In one line	The share of spins giving back a win of any size at all, irrespective of what comes back in total over time.
Fixed by	The game studio, built into the reel maths and the paytable
Where you meet it	Spec sheets and studio info panels, published rather less often than RTP

What hit frequency counts is straightforward: across the spins played, the share that return a payout at all, even one below the stake. Paytable and reel maths set it, as they do RTP and volatility, but the question it answers is not theirs. The long-run total returned is RTP’s subject; how that total splits between frequent-small and rare-large belongs to volatility; and hit frequency covers one thing only, how often the reels stop on any winning combination.

Using it in practice

Where hit frequency is low, the visible dry spells run longer than RTP on its own would suggest, and that shapes how a session feels even when the long-run maths is ordinary. Read together, a published hit frequency and a published RTP describe the feel of a session far better than either figure does alone, wherever a studio prints both. Reading it beside what rtp explained means and volatility makes it stick, since the same pages usually raise all three together.

Hit frequency and terms like it appear throughout the game pages here, and where a studio has not published the figure behind one, those pages say as much rather than lifting a number off a comparison site. Blanks in several of the spec tables here follow from that.

The common misreading

The usual reading of a high hit frequency is that the game pays more, or runs ‘looser’. It does not follow. Hits on 40% of spins can still leave a game returning just 90% overall when most of those hits fall short of the stake, while a game hitting on only 15% of spins can reach 97% because its hits pay properly. How often a win arrives and how much comes back in total are settled independently of each other.

Neither RTP nor volatility is what hit frequency measures, though comparison tables have a habit of merging all three into one impression of ‘how good is this game’. High hit frequency can sit with low volatility, with high volatility, or with anything in between — all three numbers move on their own, and the picture is incomplete without every one.

A worked example

A stated 25% hit frequency means that over a large sample roughly one spin in four gives something back on average, while the remaining three give nothing. Across 400 spins that comes to roughly 100 winners, and with moderate RTP and volatility most of them will probably come in under the stake. Whether those 100 wins come to more or less than was staked is not something that figure addresses; RTP is.

Checking Hit frequency at PH90

1. Open a game at PH90 and find its info or help screen.
2. That section covers Hit frequency; read it alongside the definition set out above.
3. Compare it with the same entry on another title before you pick one to play at PH90.
4. Write your stake and your stop point down before the first round at PH90.