The simulator runs an offer thousands of times and shows you the full range of outcomes, not just the average. Here is what every stage and every box actually does.
Two offers with the same expected value can feel completely different to play. One might pay out three times in four with modest wins, the other once in four with the occasional big one. The headline EV figure on an offer page does not tell you that, which is what this tool is for.
An offer is described as a sequence of up to three stages. Each one has its own game, its own stake and its own rules, because in real offers they genuinely are different. You might qualify on blackjack at £5 a hand and then wager a bonus on slots at 50p.
Your own deposited money, genuinely at risk. This covers the qualifying wager on a sign-up offer, the cash half of a deposit match, and a plain cashback session. Switch it off entirely for no-deposit offers where nothing of yours is on the line.
| Field | What to put in it |
|---|---|
| Deposit | What you are putting in. |
| Stake per round | What you bet each spin or hand during this stage. Independent of the bonus stage. |
| Game, RTP, Volatility | Slots use the full variance model. Blackjack and roulette pay fixed odds, so volatility is greyed out for them. Check the Slot Searcher if you are unsure of a figure. |
| Contribution | How much of your turnover counts toward wagering. Slots are usually 100%, table games often 10% or 20%, and some offers exclude them entirely at 0%. |
| Session length | Only used when you play until the balance runs out. It is the point at which you walk away. |
When you pick roulette, a bet type choice appears in place of the volatility control, because roulette pays fixed odds and its variance comes entirely from the bet you place.
Even money is red or black, odd or even. You win 18 times in 37 and get paid 1:1. Low variance, and it grinds through a turnover requirement steadily.
Single number is one number straight up. You win once in 37 and get paid 35:1. Very high variance, and worth pairing with a profit target so you stop when you hit rather than carrying on and giving it back.
Turnover met. You wager a set amount and stop. This is the normal qualifying wager on a sign-up offer.
Profit target hit. You play until you are up by a set amount, then bank it and walk. Doing this forfeits any bonus, because its wagering was never started.
Balance runs out. You play it all through. Used for cashback sessions and for deposit matches where the cash is spent before the bonus unlocks.
Cash bets pay cash means wins land in your withdrawable balance. Cash bets pay bonus means they are swept into the bonus balance instead, which drains your cash far faster and is worth checking in the terms.
Withdrawals blocked means you cannot bank a profit target part-way through the promotion. When that is set, a profit target is ignored and cash play runs until the balance is gone.
Leave the Rebate percentage blank for offers with no cashback. Set it and three more controls come alive.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pays on losses | The usual one. Returns a percentage of your net loss. |
| Pays on winnings | Pays a percentage on a winning session instead. |
| Pays either way | Pays regardless of how the session went. |
| Min qualifying loss | How much you must be down before anything pays. Leave blank if there is no threshold. |
| Max rebate | The cap on what you can get back. |
The rebate settles against your cash result at the end of the stage and is never wagered through.
Bonus funds wagered through a requirement. This stage has its own game, its own RTP and its own stake, deliberately separate from stage 1, because most people do not clear a bonus the same way they qualified for it.
Bonus only. Cash and bonus stay separate and only the bonus is played. Your deposit is never at risk. If the terms say bonus only is subject to wagering, this is you.
Cash and bonus together. Whatever cash survived stage 1 is pooled with the bonus and wagered as one balance. Your own money is at risk here, so busting loses the deposit too. If the terms say deposit and bonus are subject to wagering combined, this is you.
Set the Multiplier and use Applied to to say what it multiplies: the bonus alone, the deposit alone, or both added together. Terms vary and this is a common place to get caught out, since 30x bonus and 30x deposit plus bonus are very different requirements. The Total updates to match, and works in reverse too, so you can type the total straight from the terms and let the multiplier follow.
Stop at profit lets you walk away mid-wagering once you are up by a set amount. This only applies to a combined pot, because with bonus-only play there is nothing to bank: the bonus is forfeit until the wagering clears, so leaving early returns your deposit and nothing more.
A normal bonus converts to cash once the wagering clears. A phantom or sticky bonus never converts. Only what you win above the bonus amount can be withdrawn, and the bonus itself is removed at the end. Sticky bonuses are worth noticeably less and the simulator will show you by how much.
Set the cap from the terms, then choose what it applies to.
Bonus winnings only is the usual reading and the default. Anything you won during cash play passes through uncapped, and the cap limits only what the bonus stage can pay out. On a combined pot the cap limits winnings above your deposit, since your own money is in that balance.
Whole offer caps everything you take away, including cash winnings.
Spins awarded by the offer. They settle separately from the bonus balance and carry their own cap, so a spins cap and a bonus cap can both apply without interfering.
| Field | What to put in it |
|---|---|
| Number of spins | How many the offer awards. |
| Spin value | Value per spin, usually 10p or 20p. |
| Spin RTP, Volatility | For the slot the spins are locked to. |
| Wagering on winnings | Leave blank for wager-free spins. |
| WR stake | What you would stake while clearing it. Defaults to the spin value. |
| Max win cap | Only if the terms cap what the spins can pay. |
Switch the reward type to bonus chips for golden chip offers, where you are given roulette chips rather than spins. The difference that matters is that the chip is never returned. You are paid the winnings only, so a chip is worth less than its face value even before the house edge.
How much less depends entirely on which bet you place it on, and this catches people out constantly.
| Bet | Pays | Value retained |
|---|---|---|
| Single number | 35:1 | 94.6% |
| Split | 17:1 | 91.9% |
| Street | 11:1 | 89.2% |
| Corner | 8:1 | 86.5% |
| Six line | 5:1 | 81.1% |
| Column or dozen | 2:1 | 64.9% |
| Red or black | 1:1 | 48.6% |
Check this in the terms, because it changes everything. If the stake is not returned, the table above applies and the bet you choose matters enormously. If the stake is returned, the chip comes back along with your winnings, every bet is worth the same 97.3%, and coverage only changes how swingy the result is rather than what it is worth.
The gap is widest on the safe-looking bets. On red or black, a stake-returned chip is worth exactly twice a stake-not-returned one. On a single number the two are almost identical, because you were barely getting the stake back anyway.
The same chips are worth almost twice as much on a single number as on red or black. This is the opposite of normal roulette, where every bet returns the same 97.3%, so the instinct to play red or black and "keep it steady" quietly halves what the offer is worth.
The presets are starting points, not offer types. Each one switches the right stages on and fills in typical numbers, and you edit from there.
| Preset | The shape it sets up |
|---|---|
| Qualifying wager + free spins | The classic sign-up. Stages 1 and 3. |
| Free spins only | No deposit, nothing at risk. Stage 3 alone. |
| Deposit match | Deposit and bonus pooled and wagered together. Stages 1 and 2, combined pot. |
| Cash first, bonus as backup | Play your cash to a target, and if it busts the bonus is a second chance. |
| Sticky (phantom) bonus | A bonus that never converts, only its winnings. |
| Cashback | A session played to bust with a percentage back on losses. |
A profit target is the profit you want on top of your deposit. It is never a total balance and you should never add your deposit or bonus onto it yourself.
If you deposit £50 and want to walk away with £100 in hand, you type 50. The simulator stops you the moment you could withdraw £100, and the target card tells you how often that happened.
This is the same definition every other number on the results panel uses. Mean EV, median, and the P10 to P90 strip are all profit on top of your deposit, so they are directly comparable.
Each stage has its own Secs / round box, or Secs / spin on the free spins stage. These do not affect expected value at all. They drive the Avg Time figure and, through it, EV per hour.
Three seconds is a reasonable default for slots on autoplay. Live dealer tables are much slower, closer to twenty or thirty seconds a hand, and that difference matters enormously when you are ranking offers by hourly rate rather than by raw EV. An offer worth £20 in ten minutes and one worth £25 over three hours are not remotely the same thing.
Volatility describes how often a slot pays and how big those payouts are. Two slots can share an RTP and behave nothing alike.
Volatility does not change expected value on its own. What it changes is the gap between a bad run and a good one, which is exactly the thing an average hides from you.
Basic gives you the three numbers most decisions actually turn on. Mean EV for the long-run average, Bust Rate for the risk, and Avg Time for the effort. Advanced adds the median, probability of profit and loss, hourly EV, the P10 to P90 strip, and a sample playthroughs chart.
| Stat | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Mean EV | The average across every simulation. The headline, but it hides all the variance. |
| Bust Rate | Share of runs where the balance ran out before the wagering or turnover was cleared. |
| Median | The middle outcome. If this sits well below the mean, a few big wins are flattering the average. |
| P10 to P90 | The realistic range for a single attempt. 10% of runs did worse than P10, 10% did better than P90. |
| Hourly EV | Expected value divided by time. Useful for ranking offers when your time is the constraint. |
Underneath the headline stats, each stage gets its own card showing what it contributed to the total, how many runs even reached it, and how often the wagering cleared. The three contributions add up to the mean, so you can see at a glance whether an offer is carried by the free spins or dragged down by the qualifying wager.
If a cap is costing you anything, a separate line shows how much expected value it removed and what the mean would have been without it.
Read the mean and the median together. When they diverge sharply, the offer is carried by rare big wins and any single attempt will most likely land below the average.
Stable seeds the randomness from your inputs, so identical inputs give an identical result every time. Use it when comparing two offers or changing one field to see exactly what moved. Live draws fresh randomness on every run, which is better for getting a feel for natural variance.
10,000 simulations is the default and is enough for a solid distribution on most offers. Push to 50,000 or more for very high variance offers with rare big tails. Low counts like 10 or 100 are for watching individual playthroughs, and the simulator will warn you that the headline stats are not reliable there.
Everything here is expected value across many offers, not a guaranteed outcome on any single one. A positive EV offer can and will lose on the day you play it, and the bust rate is the simulator telling you how often that happens. That is the whole point of looking at the distribution rather than the average.
If any of this is new, the academy introduction and the first offer walkthrough cover the fundamentals before you lean on simulator output for real decisions.
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