If You Want to Win at Slots, Should You “Wait for Regular Spins” or “Buy Free Spins”? (Part 2)

By purchasing free spins, you can skip the usual process required to trigger the bonus stage during regular spins and jump straight into the bonus round. However, it’s important to note that buying free spins only increases your chance of landing a high payout — it doesn’t guarantee one.

So the real question becomes:
Is it really worth spending money to buy free spins?

To determine whether it’s better to wait for free spins through regular play or to buy them directly, the most effective approach is to actually play and monitor your balance.

Let’s calculate the minimum balance difference from the start of regular spins to the point when free spins are triggered. This helps us understand how much it typically costs to reach the free spin feature without purchasing it.

Since not many slots offer the option to purchase free spins, for this test, we’ll use the slot White Rabbit. We’ll start with an initial bankroll of $2,000, and set each spin at $1.

To ensure a solid test, we need a sufficient amount of data. So we’ll spin the slot up to 1,000 times — a number generally considered to be the minimum for reliable testing.

We’ll skip the play-by-play and go straight to the results:

First free spin triggered at: 348 spins
Second free spin triggered at: 385 spins (difference: 37 spins)
Third free spin triggered at: 870 spins (difference: 485 spins)
Fourth free spin triggered at: 876 spins (difference: 6 spins)
Fifth free spin triggered at: 1,053 spins (difference: 177 spins)

Based on these results, the average cost to trigger free spins naturally was about $102, requiring an average of 211 spins per feature. The average prize per free spin bonus was approximately $76.

In White Rabbit, the price to buy free spins is 100x your bet, which means $100 per bonus round in our case.

Since the average prize was only $76, buying free spins ended up being a losing proposition based on this data.

However, White Rabbit includes a useful mechanic called the Feature Drop, which reduces the cost of buying free spins when its symbol appears. In practice, this lowered the purchase cost from $100 to around $38.

Therefore, if you take full advantage of the Feature Drop system, White Rabbit can offer a lower-risk alternative to grinding through regular spins — and may be more cost-effective in the long run.