A hundred years ago, the only slots game you’d find would have three reels (maybe five if you were lucky), no symbols but fruit and perhaps a bell, and certainly no special bonus features.
Nowadays, things couldn’t be more different. In fact, it’s a rarity to come across a slots game with no special features.
One of the most popular bonus features in modern slots games is the hold and win feature – also described by some games as ‘lock and spin’ or ‘hold and spin’ – and that’s the focus of this article.
We’ll take you through all you need to know about these slots, including how to play and how best to profit from them, so you can approach hold and win games with confidence.
How Do Slots Games Work?
Slots games almost all work on the basis of a number of spinning reels, usually three or five, although there can be many more. When you click to play the game, each of those reels spins before landing on symbols from a predetermined range.
If you match a certain number of symbols (three or more, as a rule), either in a row or along specified paylines, you win.
Each symbol is assigned a value, meaning that the amount you win will vary depending on which symbols you’ve matched. The higher value symbols are less common, meaning that a small win is more likely than a large one.
Most modern slots games also offer bonus features, which typically give you free spins or begin a mini game if you land a certain number of bonus symbols in a spin.
There are nigh limitless variations on the traditional slots format, but the vast majority of slots games work roughly along these lines.
The outcome of the spin itself is determined by a Random Number Generator, or RNG, which is built into the game software. Each possible outcome is assigned a number, and weighted according to how frequently it should occur.
The RNG is run for every spin of the game, ensuring the result is both random and fair.
How To Play Hold And Win Slots
Normal gameplay with hold and win slots is no different from a classic slots game. Click the ‘spin’ button to launch a round of the game, and you’ll win if you match a certain number of symbols along a payline.
In the majority of cases, the hold and win bonus feature can be triggered on any spin.
With many games, you’ll have to match a number of symbols in your spin to trigger the game – sometimes only three, but often as many as five or six. In other iterations, the bonus round may be triggered from a wild symbol, or from ‘filling up’ a counter of some sort.
If you’re lucky enough to trigger the bonus, a new playgrid will normally appear, sometimes with some of the slots already filled. You’ll receive three spins (typically), and hope that the grid fills up with as many symbols (usually showing a coin or cash value) as possible.
Each time you fill a slot, the spin counter will reset. The bonus round will continue either until you run out of spins or until the grid is full – in which case you’ll often win a cash pot. If you haven’t filled the grid, the value of the symbols you’ve landed will be added up and awarded to you.
How Much Can I Win From A Hold And Win Bonus?
That all depends on how much you bet! The available prizes will depend on your stake – normally, prizes are set as a multiplier of your stake.
In ‘Lock O’ The Irish’, for example, a lock and spin game prominently featured on Ladbrokes and Coral, you could win a £500 mega jackpot by filling the lock and spin playgrid on a £1 stake – but that mega jackpot is worth only £50 from a 10p stake.
On Rising Samurai Hold & Win, meanwhile, the hold and win feature can award up to 250x your stake for a ‘grand’ pot – and you could in theory get several of those pots as part of the feature, meaning there’s potential for a truly enormous win.
However, you should bear in mind that the most likely outcome of a hold and win game – as with any slots game – is that you will lose a small amount of money.
The house always wins – which means that, unless you have an advantage in the form of a bonus of some sort, the player usually ends up losing.
What Are The Best Strategies To Profit From Hold And Win Slots?
When it comes to giving yourself the best chance of a profit, hold and win slots aren’t any different from any other kind of slots.
The key is to use a strategy that puts you in a position where you are statistically more likely than not to profit from your play.
But how does that work? To start with, it’s important to understand the concept of ‘return to player’ (also known as RTP) in casino games. This refers to the average percentage of money staked that is paid out to players in winnings.
So for example, a game with an advertised RTP of 95% would pay out £95 for every £100 staked on average, with the remaining £5 forming the casino’s profit.
Every slots game has this profit margin baked right into its operating software, whether it’s a hold and win slot or any other kind. This means that, on average, players should always expect to lose a portion of their money when playing slots.
But that’s before you take free spins into account.
The vast majority of bookies and casinos have a range of promotions on offer, which give you free spins or other casino bonuses. When you factor in these free spins, it’s often the case that, rather than expecting to lose a percentage of the money you’ve staked, you come out statistically ahead.
For example, let’s consider a typical sign up offer – stake £10 on slots to receive 100 free spins.
If the game in question has an RTP of 95%, you’d expect to make a return of £9.50 on average from your £10 wagering, resulting in a 50p loss.
If your free spins have a typical value of 10p each, you can calculate that these free spins are also worth £10 – and if you play them on a slots game that also has a 95% RTP, you can expect to make another £9.50 in winnings on average.
As a result, you would end up with an average of £9 in profit from the offer – not a bad return on a £10 investment!
Repeating this process for lots of different bookies and casinos can result in excellent ongoing profits.
And to make this easier, Oddsmonkey members who choose the All Access package gain access to over 100 casino sign up offers, plus tons of reload offers. These allow our members to make hundreds of pounds a month from casino!
It’s important to be aware that there is risk in completing casino offers. You won’t get results that precisely match the advertised RTP of a game over the course of just a couple of hundred spins – and in theory you could lose your £10 and win nothing at all from your free spins.
However, the likelihood is that you will end up in profit overall, and this is ever more likely as you complete more offers, reducing the variance in your results.
Other Ways To Make Money From Online Betting Sites
Casino offers are a great way to make money from home, but they do involve an element of risk.
A much less risky alternative, which we’d recommend if you’re nervous about casino, or if you can’t comfortably afford to lose any money staked on casino offers, is to have a go at Matched Betting.
Matched Betting is a strategy that involves betting both for and against the same outcome, and using freebies from bookies to come out in profit – and if you do it right, it’s risk free.
To help ensure you don’t make any errors, OddsMonkey’s handy tools and guides are there to guide you, making it a straightforward process even if you don’t have any experience of sports betting at all. For more information, take a look at our beginner’s guide to Matched Betting – or if you’re keen to get started straight away, take out our free trial and make your first £29 in Matched Betting profits today.
