What is Theoretical Hold?

Theoretical hold is the proportion of everything staked that a game, a floor or an operator is expected to keep over the long run. It is the operator's way of saying what a player calls RTP, and the arithmetic connecting them is simple: hold is one hundred per cent minus the return, so a slot returning 96% has a theoretical hold of 4%. The base it applies to is where players misread it. Hold is calculated against total amount staked, not against money deposited. A hundred deposited and staked twenty times over produces two thousand in turnover, and a 4% hold on that is eighty — four fifths of the deposit, from a game advertising a 4% margin. That gap between deposits and turnover is why recycling a balance costs far more than the headline figure suggests. Theoretical hold is a prediction, and actual hold is what really happened over a day, a month or a year. The two are never identical over short periods and converge over long ones, which is why an operator reporting a bad month has not necessarily seen anything unusual. The reason it is worth knowing as a player is that it makes comparisons concrete. A game with a 2% hold and a game with an 8% hold are not two similar entertainments at slightly different prices; the second costs four times as much per unit staked, and neither number is affected in the slightest by how the session happens to go.