Bonus hunt break-even, explained

Every bonus hunt has two halves. In the first you spin the base game and collect bonus rounds, spending money and banking nothing. In the second you open what you collected. Break-even is the bridge between them: it converts everything you spent in the first half into a target for the second.

The formula

Break-even has two forms, and they answer slightly different questions. The currency form tells you what each bonus has to average in money. The multiplier form — the one people quote as "break-even X" — tells you what each bonus has to average as a multiple of the stake it was collected at.

When every bonus was collected at the same stake, the two forms are the same number expressed in different units. That is why break-even X is usually written as cost ÷ (bonuses × bet size) — it is the same calculation with the stake factored out.

Hunt cost is not always the deposit

Hunt cost is what collecting actually consumed, not what you put in. If you started with 1,000 and still had 120 on the balance when you collected the last bonus, the hunt cost 880 — the 120 is still yours and is not part of the target.

Most players collect until the balance is gone, which is why the shortcut "cost = start balance" is usually close enough. It stops being close enough the moment you cut a hunt short, and every tracker that ignores it reports a break-even number that is too high.

A worked example

A 500 start balance, a stake of 2.00 per spin, and collecting stops with 0 on the balance and 18 bonuses banked.

Note how ordinary 13.9x looks and how demanding it actually is. It is not the target for one bonus — it is the target for the mean of all eighteen, including the ones that return less than the stake. A single large multiplier can carry it, and most hunts that finish level are carried by one or two rounds rather than by a consistent middle.

Two ways the number gets flattered

Counting only the bonuses you liked

Break-even is computed over every bonus collected. Dropping the ones you decided not to open, or the ones collected on a game you later swapped out, lowers the denominator and produces a target you were never actually facing. If a bonus was collected, it is in the calculation.

Changing bet size mid-collection

A hunt collected across mixed stakes has no single meaningful "bet size", and cost ÷ (bonuses × average bet) starts drifting from the truth. Use the total-stake form instead: add up the stake of every bonus individually and divide the cost by that. This is why the convention is one bet size for the whole hunt — it keeps a one-line calculation honest.

Reading break-even while a hunt is open

Once you start opening bonuses, the useful figure stops being the original break-even and becomes what the unopened ones now have to average. That is the same formula with the money already returned subtracted from the cost and the opened bonuses removed from the count.

This number moves violently, and that is the honest picture: one round above the target drops it sharply, a run of small returns pushes it out of reach. Our tracker recalculates it after every entry, and the calculator does the same arithmetic on a set of figures you type in by hand.