For those who are new to the Bonanza experience, given this is one of CM's longest ever threads, I won't just say 'Read 882 pages and all will be revealed', and instead provide this quick summary.
Bonanza has a batshit maths model that can do funny things to the brain and induce something known as 'Bonanza Psychosis', whereby the victim speaks in tongues, muttering incoherently about 'G', 'O' and 'L' whilst their bank balance mysteriously vanishes, and concerned friends and relatives consider staging an intervention.
In maths terms, it has a 1/460 average feature frequency which is stupidly infrequent and can lead to basic randomness creating some very exaggerated experiences. It's not patterns, it's not compensated, it's just randomness doing weird things due to this stupid number.
This rare feature is balanced out with a higher than average feature return (IIRC around 90x or so), but again randomness can dick you over on this and if you get on the wrong side of the feature frequency AND the feature pays, it can get pretty painful.
To make the overall experience slightly more gratifying than self-circumcision with a rusty Bic razor,
BTG have put a lot of RTP into the base game, which very rarely pays anything big (although it can), but tends to keep sessions churning along for a while. Add in the fact it's quite a slow game to play because of all the tumbles and whatnot, and it can feel like it's doing a bit less damage than it would if it was rattling along at 1000 spins per hour.
You can play Bonanza for
years and never personally experience some of the stuff it's capable of, the combination of Megaways and dynamically switching reel strips (yes it does that) means that some of the events it can produce are at odds of one in several billion (well outside lottery odds). Also the reels are quite scummily designed (a standard BTG Megaways trick) so that you get 'blocking' reels which often leave the player looking at things that seemed very close to happening but were in actual fact vanishingly unlikely.
If anyone's having a bad time with Bonanza and is relatively new to it, I'd genuinely recommend going right back to the start of this thread and having a read before binning any more deposits into it. It has always been, and still is, a bit of a nutcase of a slot - and the chances of it ever dropping a monster win into your lap are very, very small. It's not actually a high volatility slot, more medium volatility, medium-high at worst - what makes it a dangerous proposition when it comes to sucking the player in is its crackers maths model.
For me I never really chimed with it, the feature is great, I'll give BTG that, but the rest of the game just pisses me off too much so as per the screenshots I posted a few posts back, it's one I've kind of 'skirted around' over the years, rather than got overly involved with.
