Le Bandit

What these figures mean for Le Bandit

Le Bandit and Chaos Crew have the same ceiling — 10,000x — returns four hundredths of a point apart, and build tables that bottom out within four hundredths of each other. On every figure Hacksaw publishes except one, they are the same proposition. The exception is the volatility rating: 3 of 5 for this game, 5 of 5 for Chaos Crew. That single notch is the entire published difference between them, and it is a label rather than a number.

This is worth dwelling on, because the rating is being asked to carry a lot of weight. A player choosing between two games with identical ceilings and identical returns has nothing else to go on. If the studio published an index — the way NetEnt publishes 3.9 for Aloha Cluster Pays and Nolimit City publishes 19.08 for Misery Mining — then "3 of 5" could be checked against it, and you would know whether the gap between a 3 and a 5 on this scale is the gap between 4 and 7 or between 4 and 40. It is not published, so the honest answer is that a 3-of-5 game from this studio is less dispersed than its 5-of-5 games by an unknown amount.

What can be said without the index is structural, and it follows from the ceiling. Both games cap at 10,000x and both return about 96.3% at their flagship build. If this one really is less volatile, then the money must arrive in more frequent, smaller pieces than in Chaos Crew, because there is no room at the top for it to arrive any other way — the maximum is the same. Lower variance with the same ceiling and the same return means a fuller middle. That is a reasonable inference from three published numbers, and it is as far as the inference goes: no hit frequency, no odds on a 100x and no base-game split are published for either game, so the shape of that fuller middle is not something anyone outside the studio can describe.

The build table is where the real money question sits, as it does for every Hacksaw title here. This game is certified at 96.34%, 94.23%, 92.17% and 88.36%. The spread is 7.98 percentage points; in cash, at £1 a spin over a thousand spins, the top build costs about £36.60 and the bottom about £116.40. The 3-of-5 volatility rating will make no difference whatsoever to that £80 gap, and the gap is decided by the operator rather than the studio.

One thing the 3-of-5 rating should not be taken to mean is that this is a gentle game in absolute terms. Its ceiling is 10,000x. The genuinely gentle games in this catalogue — the ones with published indexes under 4 — cap at 700x for Jack Hammer and Aloha Cluster Pays, 900x for Blood Suckers and 800x for Starburst. This game can pay more than fourteen times what Jack Hammer can, which by itself rules out a Blood Suckers-style distribution: a game that holds a 10,000x outcome has to be lumpier than one that cannot. "Three of five" is relative to Hacksaw's own range, and that range starts well above where NetEnt's gentle end sits.

For context on how much Hacksaw leaves unsaid, compare the specification for a Nolimit City game of comparable intent. Karen Maneater, with a slightly higher ceiling at 11,757x, comes with a volatility index of 36.42, a hit frequency of 24.58%, a 55.59% base return, a 40.41% bonus return, a 100x win once in 755 spins and a maximum once in 330,000. That is six checkable figures. Here there are three, one of which is a word.

For completeness on the pricing, the four builds here are 96.34%, 94.23%, 92.17% and 88.36% — the same four-step pattern Hacksaw uses for Wanted Dead or a Wild and Chaos Crew 2, with a flagship near 96.3% and a floor near 88.3%. Chaos Crew, the older game, has only three steps and no 94% option, which means a casino running the middle build of this game gives you 94.23% where the same operator could only offer 92.4% on that one. Across all four of the studio's titles on this site the floor sits between 88.28% and 88.42%, a range of fourteen hundredths of a point, which suggests the bottom build is a deliberate product rather than a per-game decision. Eight points of return, offered as a discount across an entire range, is a commercial policy and not an accident of certification.

The summary: if you want the Hacksaw experience without the maximum volatility rating, this is the title, and that sentence is the most specific thing the published data supports. Same 10,000x ceiling as Chaos Crew, same flagship return to within a rounding error, one notch gentler on a scale the studio does not define — and, like all four of its games here, sold at four prices with eight points between the best and the worst.

The RTP you get depends on the casino

Hacksaw certifies this game in 4 different RTP builds and each casino chooses which one to run. Most review sites print a single number; these are all the builds the studio publishes for Le Bandit, highest first. The figure at the top of this page is the studio default, marked below.

On £100 of turnover the gap between the highest and lowest build here is £7.98. A casino is not obliged to tell you which build it runs, so treat any single RTP figure — including ours — as the studio default until you have checked the game's own info screen in the lobby.

How Le Bandit 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.