Hold and Win: What the Base Game Pays and What the Bonus Pays

Two machines on one balance

Our Hold and Win guide explains the engine and sets seven pooled clocks side by side. This page asks a narrower question of the seven sessions logged on this portal, one per carrier: 777 Coins, Royal Joker, Thunder Coins, Thunder Coins XXL: Multicoin, Royal Coins 2, Gold Express and Little Farm. Each log is cut into two piles of money, and every credit in it goes to one pile or the other. The first pile holds everything the base game paid, line wins and the instant collects that Gold Express and Little Farm run between features. The second pile holds everything paid inside a triggered round, Hold and Win boards and, on the two dual-feature carriers, Free Spins as well.

An eighth log sits beside the seven as a control, and it was chosen for what it lacks. Burning Wins is a plain five-line fruit machine from Playson, the studio behind Royal Coins 2 and its two successors on this page, Royal Joker and Thunder Coins, and it has no feature of any kind. Whatever it returns, it returns through the reels, so it shows what a base game looks like when nothing else is coming. None of the eight sessions is pooled with anyone else's here: the page takes one portal session per game, so that every column is a single ledger split the same way.

Eight logs on one definition

Every session ran on the provider's demo at a fixed stake of 1.00, with natural triggers only and no feature bought. A spin is a paid spin, and respins and free spins aren't counted as spins, because nothing is staked on them. A round's payout is everything credited for the board itself, from its opening to its settlement, with the trigger spin's own line win left to the base game. The shares below are money over money: what each half paid, divided by everything staked in that session.

Sources: session reports 777C-20260721-01, RJHW-20260729-01, TCHW-20260729-01, TCXM-20260729-01, RC2H-20260728-01, GEXP-20260726-01, LFRM-20260727-01 and BWCL-20260805-01, each published on this portal with its checkpoint table and its round register. The round totals in this table are the totals of those registers, and the base-game figure is everything else the session returned.

The base game pays about half the stake back

The first finding is how little the seven base games differ once the rounds are taken out. They returned between 42.54% and 55.66% of the money staked, and the intervals around those figures overlap from end to end. A base-game return measured on 2,500 to 3,000 spins carries a margin of seven to nine points either way, so seven logs can't rank seven base games. What they can say together is that the reels alone hand back about half the stake. Between rounds the balance therefore falls by about half a bet per spin. The erosion came to 57 bets per hundred spins on 777 Coins and on Royal Joker, 49 on Thunder Coins, 44 on Thunder Coins XXL, 47 on Royal Coins 2, 52 on Gold Express and 47 on Little Farm.

The seven carriers reach that half of the stake by three quite different roads. Four single-feature carriers, Royal Coins 2 among them, play a 3x3 board with five lines, where the smallest win is the stake itself and nothing pays less. Their base games paid on one spin in ten to eleven and a half, with a median payment of 4 bets. The longest silences in the four logs ran 52, 62, 63 and 78 spins. The two dual-feature carriers play twenty and twenty-five lines on a 5x4 board, and their base games paid on one spin in five. Nearly one payment in two came in under the stake, 44% on Gold Express and 45% on Little Farm, and the median payment was about one bet. Twice as many payments bought back the same half of the stake, and the longest silences shortened to 40 and 26 spins. Thunder Coins XXL sits between the two roads, fifteen lines on a 3x5 board with a base game that paid on one spin in seven and a half; 42 of its 358 payments came in under the stake, the median payment was two bets and the longest silence ran 40 spins.

Burning Wins shows what the other design looks like on the same kind of board. With no feature to fund, its reels returned 89.03% of the stakes in our log, from a payment on one spin in fourteen and a half. The smallest win on its paytable is seven bets, the median payment was 7 and the mean was nearly 13. Set beside its three studio-mates of the same layout, the control shows where some forty points of return went. Royal Coins 2, Thunder Coins and Royal Joker pay smaller sums a little more often on the same board and the same five lines, and the difference is parked in the bonus. The fruit machine's balance fell 11 bets per hundred spins, while the three Hold and Win boards fell 47, 49 and 57.

What the rounds paid

Here the seven logs agree on one number and on little else. The median round paid 41.5, 45, 46, 49 and 52 bets on the five single-feature carriers, and 38 and 38.75 on the two that split their clock with Free Spins. A median is the middle of one log's sorted rounds, half smaller and half larger, and on these boards it sat at forty-odd bets whatever the box promises. The means run from 41 to 90 bets, and the whole spread sits at the top of each table. Three rounds carried 47% of the round money on 777 Coins and 57% on Royal Joker, where one 664x board was over a third of everything the rounds paid.

Round statistics cover every round in each log, and on Gold Express that is 46, one of which opened inside a Free Spins round. The clock and its range count the 45 paid spins that opened a round there. The ranges are exact Poisson intervals on the number of triggers, the rule our methodology page sets for any count of rare events. Corrected 18 September 2026: the Gold Express column had counted 45 finished rounds and a 46th left out as unfinished, and the session report now shows all 46 played out, one of them opened inside another. The mean round, the count under 20x, the two feature medians and shares, the clock and its range moved with that count. Updated 29 September 2026: Thunder Coins XXL: Multicoin joined both tables as a sixth carrier, from session TCXM-20260729-01, and the sentences that count carriers were reread against it; the earlier five columns are unchanged. Updated 10 October 2026: Royal Coins 2: Hold and Win joined both tables as a seventh carrier, from session RC2H-20260728-01, and the sentences that count and rank carriers were reread against it; the earlier six columns are unchanged. Three older sentences were corrected in the same pass: the cost of the longest waits, which had put every one of them at 300 bets or more; the comparison of the dual-feature waits with them; and the rank of Thunder Coins' base game in the closing section.

Gold Express and Little Farm trade the size of a round for the traffic of rounds. Their triggers arrived every 61 and 91 paid spins, from a third more often to three times as often as on the single-feature boards. Their top three rounds carried only a fifth of the round money, against 31% to 57% on the five single-feature boards. Inside those shared clocks the two features aren't equals, at least on one of the two machines. On Gold Express the 28 Hold and Win boards had a median of 42 bets and the 18 Free Spins rounds a median of 15.1. The boards paid 54.46% of the stakes there and the Free Spins 22.83%. On Little Farm the two features ran level, fifteen rounds each, with medians of 40 and 35.1 bets.

The clocks deserve their ranges, because fifteen or twenty rounds is a small count. Fifteen rounds in 2,500 spins leave the 777 Coins clock somewhere from 101 to 298 spins per round, and sixteen rounds leave Thunder Coins at 114 to 324, with fifteen rounds in 2,705 spins leaving Thunder Coins XXL at 109 to 322 on top of both. Twenty-four rounds in 2,991 spins leave Royal Coins 2 at 84 to 195, and Royal Joker's twenty-one sit at 86 to 214. The sheet Playson gives operators puts that Royal Coins 2 clock at 133 spins, a figure the range holds. Those ranges overlap, so the five logs can't say which board is the quicker. Gold Express is the one case a range can support: 45 triggers put its clock at 45 to 83 spins per trigger, under all five single-feature ranges, the nearest of which starts at 84.

The bonus decides the session

Put the two halves back together and the seven sessions mostly sort themselves by the second one. Ranked by session return they run Gold Express, Royal Joker, Little Farm, Royal Coins 2, Thunder Coins XXL, 777 Coins and Thunder Coins, from 124.96% down to 80.00%. Ranked by what the rounds paid they run in the same order with two swaps between neighbours, from 77.29% of the stakes down to 29.09%. Royal Coins 2's rounds paid 45.34% of the stakes against 45.31% on Little Farm, and the two sessions closed 0.16 of a point apart in the other order. The XXL's rounds paid 35.27% of the stakes against 43.96% on 777 Coins, and its base game, the best of the seven at 55.66%, lifted it one place. Ranked by the base game they run Thunder Coins XXL, Little Farm, Royal Coins 2, Thunder Coins, Gold Express, 777 Coins and Royal Joker, an order with no other bearing on the result. Thunder Coins had the fourth-best base game of the seven and the worst session; Royal Joker had the weakest base game and the second-best session.

The arithmetic of the wait shows why the second half decides and the first one does not. On 777 Coins an average gap of 167 spins cost 95 bets of base-game erosion, and the median round refunded 45. Royal Joker's average gap cost 76 bets against a median round of 46, and Thunder Coins' cost 91 against 49. The XXL's average gap of 180 spins cost 80 bets against a median round of 52, and Royal Coins 2's gap of 125 cost 58 against 41.5. On those five boards the middle round of the table pays back between half and seven tenths of the wait that bought it. The account is squared, when it is squared, by the few rounds at the top of the table. The dual-feature carriers run closer to even, 32 bets of wait against a 38-bet median on Gold Express and 42 against 38.75 on Little Farm. I would expect exactly this from a format that keeps its value in a long tail. The ordinary round is a partial refund, and the rest sits in the few large boards and in the jackpot tiers above them.

What one log per game can carry

Each figure on this page describes one session, and the two halves aren't equally firm. The base-game shares rest on thousands of spins and still carry seven to nine points of margin either way. Burning Wins carries fourteen points of it, because its wins are fewer and larger. The round shares are far looser than that, and Royal Joker's 68.30% is the clearest case. On the evidence of 21 rounds it could sit anywhere between 14% and 122% of the stakes, since one 664x board moves the whole figure. The split of a session is therefore a description of that session, and the next log of the same game will split differently.

Two things survive that caution, and both of them are of practical use to a player. The base games of all seven carriers returned about half the stake, in seven logs from two studios, and no interval reaches two thirds. None of the seven builds prints its return. The figures in circulation, 95.62% to 95.75%, come from Playson's guides for operators for Royal Joker and Thunder Coins and for Royal Coins 2, and from third-party databases for the other four, and we can't confirm any of them against the builds. If those figures hold, the rounds have to supply the rest over the long run. On these base games the rest is somewhere between a third and three fifths of everything staked. The second survivor is the median round, which held between 38 and 52 bets on seven different boards. No other figure the rounds produced was as steady, and it is the one I would budget a session around.

How to read a Hold and Win session

The practical reading follows directly from the two piles of money described above. The base game won't carry a session on any of these seven boards, since it hands back half the stake and keeps the rest against the next round. A bankroll should therefore be sized for the wait and not for the average. The longest waits in these logs ran 634, 594, 707, 430 and 492 paid spins on the single-feature boards. At the rate each base game lost between rounds, the three longest took 340 bets or more before the board opened, and the other two took 191 and 230. On Gold Express and Little Farm the longest waits were 360 and 464 spins, the first shorter than all five and the second than four of them, and no cheaper per spin.

The second reading concerns the median round and what a player may ask of it. Forty to fifty-odd bets is where the middle of the round table sat on all seven boards. A session that needs more than that from its next round is asking for the top of the table. On 777 Coins three rounds of fifteen carried nearly half of the round money, and on Royal Joker a single 664x board out of twenty-one rounds put the session ahead. Thunder Coins never found such a round in sixteen tries, and its session closed at 80.00% with the fourth-best base game of the seven carriers.

The seven reviews hold the full tables, the frames and the pooled clocks: 777 Coins, Royal Joker, Thunder Coins, Thunder Coins XXL: Multicoin, Royal Coins 2, Gold Express and Little Farm. The control has a review of its own, Burning Wins, written on the same protocol. All eight builds play free on our Demo Shelf, where a few hundred spins will show the wait better than any table; 18+ applies there too.