How to start a bonus hunt

Step 1 — set the budget first

The budget is the whole hunt. It decides how many bonuses you can collect, what stake is viable and what your break-even lands at, so picking it first is not bookkeeping — it is the only decision that constrains everything else. Write it down before you open a game.

A budget chosen after you have started is not a budget. The common failure is deciding to "collect a few more" once the balance runs low, which quietly doubles the cost and pushes break-even past anything the line-up can reach.

Step 2 — pick one bet size and keep it

One stake for the whole hunt is the single most useful convention in the format. It keeps break-even a one-line calculation, it makes average X comparable across the whole line-up, and it stops the session turning into a series of unrelated decisions.

Rough guide to the arithmetic: a stake of around 0.2% to 0.5% of the budget gives most line-ups room to collect a reasonable number of bonuses without the balance disappearing in a few dozen spins. On a 500 budget that is roughly 1.00 to 2.50 a spin. Lower stakes mean more bonuses and a lower break-even; higher stakes mean fewer bonuses and a shorter session. Neither changes the expected result.

Step 3 — build the line-up

Decide which games you will collect from before you start, and how many bonuses you are aiming for. Two constraints do real work here: the games have to accept your stake, and the provider has to allow a bonus round to be parked rather than played immediately.

• Check the stake range on each game — a game whose minimum stake is above your chosen bet size is out of the line-up, not a reason to change stake.
• Check whether the studio lets a bonus round be saved. Some do not, and a game that forces you to open the round on the spot cannot be part of a collect-first session.
• Decide the target number of bonuses. Twenty is a common round number; the honest answer is whatever the budget supports at your stake.

Our provider rules reference lists which studios in our database allow a saved bonus, and the slot selection guide covers what players actually put in a line-up and the reasons they give for it.

Step 4 — collect

Spin the base game until a bonus round triggers, park it, move to the next game. Record each one as it lands: the game, the stake, and the balance you were on. Recording as you go is the difference between a hunt you can analyse afterwards and a vague memory of how it felt.

1. Open the tracker and enter your start balance.
2. Add a row each time a bonus triggers — game name and stake.
3. Stop when you hit your target count or the budget is gone, whichever comes first.
4. Note the balance left when you stopped. That is what makes the cost figure honest.

Step 5 — open them, in order

The convention is to open in the order collected, and it exists to stop the session becoming a sequence of choices about which round to save for last. Record the payout for each round as you go; the tracker updates average X, the running result and what the remaining rounds now have to average.

Expect the numbers to swing. A hunt is a small sample of a heavily skewed distribution, and it is normal for most rounds to land below break-even and for the session to be decided by one or two of them.

Step 6 — record the result

The result is total returned minus hunt cost. Write it down whether it was good or bad — a record that only contains the sessions worth remembering is worse than no record, because it will tell you the format works better than it does.

Signed-in accounts keep a full archive of hunts and bonuses, which is what the aggregate statistics on this site are built from. The browser tracker keeps your current hunt locally so you can run one without an account at all.