Jack Hammer

What these figures mean for Jack Hammer

Jack Hammer returns 96.96%, the third-highest figure in this catalogue, and it can pay you 700 times your stake at most. Those two facts are not a coincidence, and this game is the cleanest place on the site to show why.

Line up the six highest-returning games here with their ceilings: Blood Suckers 98% and 900x, Steam Tower 97.04% and 1,000x, Jack Hammer 96.96% and 700x, Dead or Alive 2 96.8% and 1,600x, Finn and the Swirly Spin 96.62% and 300x, Divine Fortune 96.59% and 1,000x. Not one of them can pay more than 1,600 times stake. Now line up the six biggest ceilings: Tombstone R.I.P. 300,000x, Misery Mining 70,000x, Mental 66,666x, Dead Canary 65,000x, Fire in the Hole xBomb 60,000x, Das xBoot 55,200x. Their returns are 96.08%, 96.09%, 96.08%, 96.02%, 96.06% and 96.03% — a spread of seven hundredths of a percentage point across six games from two studios.

That is the trade, stated as plainly as the data allows. A game that offers a five-figure multiplier is priced at almost exactly 96%, every time, with no exceptions in this catalogue. A game that gives up on the big multiplier can afford to return 97% or 98%. The extra percentage point is what the ceiling costs, and it is paid by every player in every session rather than recovered by the one who hits the top prize.

So what does 96.96% with a 700x cap actually buy? A hit frequency of 25% — one spin in four returns something — and a volatility index of 3.8, the third-gentlest here behind Blood Suckers at 2.7 and Starburst at 3.1, and a shade below its near-twin Aloha Cluster Pays at 3.9. In money: at £1 a spin this game keeps 3.04p against the catalogue average of 3.57p, so a thousand spins cost about £30.40 rather than £35.70. Against Gonzo's Quest, the catalogue's most expensive game at 95.97%, the saving is almost £10 per thousand spins. That is the entire proposition, and it is a sound one for a player who wants to play for a while.

There is a near-identical game in this catalogue, and the comparison is instructive because the specifications are so close. Aloha Cluster Pays has the same 700x ceiling, a volatility index of 3.9 against this game's 3.8, a hit frequency of 21% against 25%, and a return of 96.42% against 96.96%. Four measures, and Jack Hammer is level or better on all four — same cap, marginally smoother, pays on a fifth more spins, and returns half a point more. Over a thousand £1 spins that half-point is £5.40 in your favour. When two games sit this close, the choice is not a matter of taste; one of them is simply the better-priced version of the same thing, and the published figures say which.

What NetEnt does not publish for this game is any of the distribution detail: no base-game return, no feature share, no odds on the 700x or on anything else. We know how often it pays and how uneven it is in the studio's own terms, and nothing more. For comparison, every Nolimit City title on this site states the odds of a 100x win; for this one, the best we can say is that with a 700x ceiling, a 100x is at most a seventh of the maximum, and in a 3.8-index game those are not routine outcomes. That is reasoning from the shape, not a published figure.

One more consequence of the low ceiling deserves stating, because it is the part players tend to discover late. With a maximum of 700x, this game cannot produce a win that recovers a long losing run. On a £1 stake the best possible single outcome is £700, so a player who has worked through £800 over an evening cannot be made whole by one spin, however it lands — the mathematics does not contain that outcome. In Mental or Misery Mining it does, at odds of once in 18,000,000 and once in 60,000,000 respectively, which is a different kind of false comfort. Here the comfort is removed rather than falsified: you know from the start that the session cannot be rescued, which makes the 3.8 index and the 96.96% return the only things worth playing for.

There is no feature buy, which is the norm for this studio — Dead or Alive 2 is the only NetEnt title in this catalogue that has one. The two-stage sticky-wild respin that defines this game is reached by ordinary play or not at all.

The summary is that this is a well-priced, low-ceiling, frequently-paying game, and the interesting thing about it is structural rather than particular. If you are choosing between slots on the basis of the top prize, this catalogue says you will be paying about a percentage point of return for the privilege, and that point is taken from you on every spin while the prize arrives once in tens of millions. Jack Hammer is on the other side of that bargain: the ceiling is small, the return is near the top of the site, and the 3.8 index means you will notice neither of those facts dramatically in a single session.

What the studio publishes about the maths

Figures NetEnt states for Jack Hammer itself — not our estimates.

How Jack Hammer 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.