Sponsored PR: Betaro releases free 2026 slot study built on 521 million real-money bets
The free study, built on bets logged at 21 crypto and sweepstakes casinos, also found an $18.1m win on a single spin and a clear shift in play toward Pragmatic Play. Anyone can use the data with credit
Betaro, the slot demo and data site, has published The Betaro Slot Study 2026, a free study built on 521,008,025 real bets logged between 2 February and 26 October 2026 at 21 crypto and sweepstakes casinos: 500 Casino, BC.Game, BetFury, Duel, Duelbits, Gamba, Gamdom, Goated, MyPrize, Rainbet, Razed, Roobet, Shuffle, Shuffle.us, Solcasino, Stake, Stake.us, Thrill, Toshi.bet, Winna and Yeet. About half of those bets, 260.5 million, were on 10,481 slots, and that slot play is what the study looks at.
The full study, with charts and eight downloadable data tables, is at https://betaro.net/reports/slot-data-study-2026
Remakes run the charts
Fifteen of the 25 most played slots this year are a newer version, sequel or spin-off of an earlier game, and between them they took 62.4% of the bets on the top 25. Put an original next to its remake, and the remake usually wins easily. Over the last 30 days, Sugar Rush 1000 drew 6.6 times the bets of the original Sugar Rush, and Madame Destiny Megaways drew 35 times the original. It doesn’t always work, though. The Dog House from 2019 still drew twice the bets of The Dog House Megaways 1000.
Most new slots are gone within two months
Of 497 new slots that launched between mid-February and late July, 105 made Betaro’s weekly top 100 at some point. Only 21 were still there eight weeks after launch. Four weeks in, a typical big launch was getting about a tenth of the share of play it had in its best week.
Sweet Bonanza 2500 was the exception. It had the strongest launch of the year, taking 3.2% of all slot bets in its first 30 days, and it was still the third most-played slot in October. Big Bass Raceday Repeat, the third best launch, had dropped to 342nd by October, and Junkyard Kings 2 went from a top-10 launch to 1,963rd.
Pragmatic Play pulls ahead
Looking only at the four casinos Betaro tracked all year (Gamdom, Roobet, Rainbet and Shuffle), Pragmatic Play’s share of slot bets rose from 43.1% in March to 49.4% in October. Hacksaw Gaming fell from 23.3% to 19.0% and Nolimit City from 10.4% to 8.0%. ELK Studios grew the fastest, from almost nothing to 1.5%. Across every casino in the study, Hacksaw’s Wanted Dead or a Wild was still the most played slot of the year, with 6,063,998 bets.
An $18.1m spin
The biggest single win Betaro logged was $18,146,506 on Paperclip Gaming’s Sky Drop at Stake on 18 October, from a $12,013 bet that hit 1,511x. Eight of the year’s 10 biggest wins happened at Stake. The biggest multiplier was a 500,000x max win on Valkyrie’s Odin’s Vault, also at Stake, where a $0.80 spin paid $400,000. Nine of the 10 biggest multipliers were a slot’s full max win, and seven of them came on Stake Engine games.
Slot payout rates and win frequencies
About a third of slot spins (33.9%) paid anything back, even if it was less than the stake. One in 4.5 paid at least double, one in 114 paid 100x or more, and one in 2,550 hit 1,000x. Volatility made almost no difference to how often a slot paid something, but it made a big difference at the top end. Low volatility slots hit 1,000x once every 17,240 spins, high volatility slots once every 1,960.
“People in this industry talk a lot about what’s popular, but most of it is guesswork or marketing,” said John Marshall, founder of Betaro. “We count real bets every day, so we put the whole year on one page and made it free for anyone to use. The launch numbers surprised me the most. Hundreds of slots come out, and only a couple of dozen are still getting real play two months later.”
“The remakes tell the same story from the other side,” Marshall added. “Studios are going back to their old hits, adding bigger multipliers or a new feature, and players follow. It isn’t guaranteed. The original Dog House still outdraws its Megaways 1000 version two to one.”
Free to use
The study is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Journalists, analysts, affiliates, operators, studios and creators can quote the findings, reuse the charts or download the tables, as long as they credit Betaro and link to the study page: https://betaro.net/reports/slot-data-study-2026
Data collection methodology
All figures come from bets Betaro logged at the 21 casinos listed above, grouped by game and by day. Betaro added casinos during the year (Stake joined in May), so changes over time are measured by share of play rather than raw bet counts. Slot findings cover only games classed as slots; crash, instant-win and casino original games are left out. A win only counts when the payout matches the bet times the multiplier and the multiplier is within the slot’s official max win. Amounts are in US dollars as shown in each casino’s public bet feed.
About Betaro
Betaro is a free slot demo and data site. It has free demos of more than 9,300 online slots alongside live stats from more than 520 million real bets, so players can see how a game actually plays before they try it. Its Hot Slots page shows which games are paying above their usual rate right now, and The Betaro Report ranks the most played slots every month. Betaro is for adults 18 and over where online gambling is legal.