How free spins actually work.

A spin is a stake, not a prize

"50 free spins" reads like a quantity of winnings. It's a quantity of stake — fifty pulls of a game, paid for by the operator instead of by you. Which means the headline number tells you only half of what you need, and the other half is the spin value.

Bonus spins are normally pinned to the game's minimum bet: $0.10 or $0.20, whatever the floor is. So the two offers below look nothing alike on a banner and are worth almost the same thing:

Worth knowing rather than worrying about: those spins run through the same game with the same RTP as everyone else's, so a $5.00 run of stake at 96.5% is expected to return a bit under five dollars — with the actual result anywhere from nothing to a genuinely large win, because that's what variance is and that's the fun of it.

Two lines in the terms decide everything

Free-spin offers vary enormously, and you can tell which kind you're holding in under a minute. Two lines do the work:

• Wagering on the winnings. If the terms say winnings are paid in cash, or wagering is none, whatever you win is simply yours. If there's a multiplier on the winnings instead, the offer is a chance to play rather than a payout — still worth taking, but take it for the play, not for the balance.
• Maximum cash-out. Often capped, and it's the line that matters most if you hit something big. Read it before the spins, not after.

Two more that are quick to check and easy to trip over: expiry (spins usually die in 24 hours to 7 days) and which game they're locked to, because the spins are nearly always tied to one specific title.

Getting the most out of the ones you take

• Play them on the game they're tied to, deliberately. The spins are locked to one title anyway — so spend ten minutes on that title's demo first and you'll actually understand what you're watching when it counts.
• Don't rush the expiry. Spins burned at 2am on the last night of a 24-hour window are the ones people don't remember playing at all.
• Know the shape of the game. A high-volatility slot spends most spins doing nothing and then does everything at once; that's normal and it's the reason the big numbers exist. If you'd rather have steadier action, take spins on something lower-volatility.

This week's pick

Chicken Road 2, and the reason is that the mechanic is unusually easy to read: every step forward has a number printed on it, so you can see the trade you're making between one more step and stopping. Very few casino games are that legible.

Play the demo here — fake credits, no account — and you'll know within two minutes whether it's your kind of thing. That is the whole point of a demo, and it costs you nothing to find out.