Deadwood

What these figures mean for Deadwood

Deadwood pays something on 40.17% of spins. That is the highest hit frequency of any Nolimit City game in this catalogue by a clear margin — the next is Mental at 34.19%, then Das xBoot at 22.17%, and Tombstone R.I.P. at 9.08% — and it puts this game in the company of NetEnt's gentlest releases rather than its own stablemates. Blood Suckers pays on 45% of spins at a volatility index of 2.7. Deadwood pays on 40.17% at an index of 16.77, six times higher.

Those two numbers should not sit together, and understanding why they do is the point of this page. A high hit frequency usually means low variance, because frequent returns smooth a balance out. Here the frequency is high and the variance is high anyway, which can only mean one thing: the frequent wins are very small relative to the rare ones. The studio's split confirms where the weight is — 58.04% from the base game and 37.98% from the bonus, out of 96.03% — so almost four tenths of the return is behind a round that arrives once in 197 spins. The 40% of spins that pay something are, for the most part, handing back fractions of a stake while the money that matters waits behind the feature.

The figure that measures this directly is the 100x. A win of a hundred times your stake or better comes once in 1,135 spins. Set that against the 40.17% hit rate and the contrast is stark: you will see roughly 456 paying spins before the first one that is worth remembering. Compare Das xBoot, which pays on 22.17% of spins — about half as often — but reaches a 100x once in 635 spins, nearly twice as readily. Deadwood pays twice as often and pays well half as often. That is what an index of 16.77 above a 40% hit rate actually describes, and no single published number says it; it takes both.

There is one gap in this game's specification, and it is unusual for this studio. Nolimit City publishes maximum-win odds for seven of its nine titles here — once in 64,000,000 spins for Das xBoot, once in 130,000,000 for Tombstone R.I.P., once in 330,000 for Karen Maneater. For Deadwood and for Punk Rocker it publishes none. So the 13,950x ceiling on this game sits without the counterweight that makes those other headlines honest, and we cannot tell you whether it is a once-in-a-season or a once-in-a-lifetime outcome. Given that this studio publishes the figure for everything else, its absence here is worth noticing rather than assuming it would have been flattering.

The ceiling is the second-lowest of the Nolimit City games in this catalogue, 13,950x — only Karen Maneater sits below it at 11,757x, while Das xBoot reaches 55,200x, Dead Canary 65,000x, Mental 66,666x and Misery Mining 70,000x. Combined with the highest hit rate of the nine and a base return of 58.04% that beats three of its siblings, this is the studio's most approachable game here on the measures that decide a session. It is still, by any other standard, an extreme game: the 16.77 index is nearly double the 9.9 that is NetEnt's highest figure on this site.

The most revealing comparison is with a game from a different studio entirely. Gonzo's Quest pays on 41% of spins — within a point of this game — and NetEnt rates its dispersion at 6.7. Two slots, almost the same proportion of paying spins, and one measures two and a half times bumpier than the other. Everything that separates them lives in the size distribution of those wins, not in how often they arrive. If you have ever wondered why two games that "pay all the time" feel nothing alike, this pair is the answer, and the only reason it can be shown at all is that both studios publish an index on the same scale.

The summary: the most approachable game Nolimit City has in this catalogue, and still one that pays a meaningful win once in eleven hundred spins. Its 40.17% hit rate is the figure people will quote about it and the one most likely to mislead — frequency here is not generosity, it is texture. The two numbers that describe what this game actually does are the 16.77 index and the 1,135-spin wait, and the studio deserves credit for publishing the second one while declining, on this title and Punk Rocker alone among its nine releases here, to publish the odds on its ceiling.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures Nolimit City states for Deadwood itself — not our estimates.

How Deadwood compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures. Nolimit City lists this title as certified for UKGC.