A high-volatility game concentrates its return into a feature, which makes the interval between features the most important number describing it. Nobody publishes it, and it can be established in half an hour.
What you are measuring
Rounds between feature triggers, over a long enough sample to mean something. A single interval is noise; twenty intervals give a distribution, and the distribution is what matters because the worst case is the one that ends sessions.
The average alone is misleading here. A mean of two hundred rounds is consistent with regular gaps of six hundred, and the six hundred is what a real bankroll has to survive.
How to run it
Fixed stake, tally on paper, and no ante bet active. Recording rounds between triggers on the Gates of Olympus free demo over three hundred spins produces a usable sample without taking an afternoon.
Keep the longest gap separately. It is the figure the calculation afterwards depends on, and it is the one people forget to write down.
- Fix the stake and disable any ante option
- Tally rounds between each feature trigger
- Record the longest gap you observe
- Divide a realistic budget by the stake
- Compare rounds of survival against that gap
The calculation it feeds
Budget divided by stake gives rounds of survival. If that number is below the longest observed gap, the stake is too high for the budget — not as a matter of taste but arithmetically, because the game cannot deliver its return within the runway available.
Why the sample is still small
Three hundred rounds against a mechanism calibrated over millions is a rough estimate and should be treated as one. What it reliably delivers is an order of magnitude — whether gaps run to dozens or to hundreds — and that is enough to set a stake sensibly.
The ante bet complication
Any option that increases trigger frequency changes the number being measured, so it must be off during the count and the count repeated if it is later switched on. Mixing the two produces a figure describing neither configuration.
What the exercise settles
The stake, which is the only decision a player genuinely controls. Everything else about the game is fixed by its configuration, and matching the stake to the observed interval is the whole of what can be done about it deliberately.