RTP, short for return to player, is the percentage of all staked money a game is designed to pay back to players on average over a very long run of play.
It is the mirror image of the house edge. A slot with a 96% RTP is built to return about 96 units for every 100 staked over time, keeping roughly 4 as the house edge. Because it is a long-run average measured across enormous numbers of spins, RTP tells you almost nothing about a single session. You can lose quickly on a high-RTP game or win big on a low-RTP one; the figure only describes the underlying design.
RTP is usually published by the game’s maker, and some titles ship in several RTP versions, so the same game can run at a different percentage from one casino to another. It is worth checking the actual configured RTP rather than assuming a value.
For example, if you stake 1 unit per spin on a 96% RTP slot for 1,000 spins, the theory says you would get back around 960 units on average, for a modelled loss of 40. Real results scatter widely around that average, which is where volatility comes in.
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