It is the single most quoted figure in modern slot marketing. It is also just seven to the power of six, and it means less than it appears to.
A specific number recurs across hundreds of online slots from dozens of unrelated studios: 117,649 ways to win. It appears in marketing, in reviews, and on the games themselves.
It is not arbitrary, and it is not a design choice made independently by each studio. It is arithmetic, and understanding where it comes from explains both what the mechanic does and why the headline overstates it.
The calculation
Conventional slots have fixed paylines — defined patterns across the reels, and a win requires matching symbols along one of them.
The mechanic behind the 117,649 figure discards paylines. Instead, each reel displays a variable number of symbols on each spin, and any matching symbols on consecutive reels from the leftmost pay, regardless of position.
The total number of combinations is therefore the product of the symbol counts across the reels. With six reels each showing up to seven symbols:
7 × 7 × 7 × 7 × 7 × 7 = 7⁶ = 117,649
That is the entire derivation. The figure is the maximum, occurring only when every reel simultaneously shows its full complement of seven — a configuration that does not arise on most spins.
The typical spin offers far fewer ways, and the advertised number is a ceiling rather than a description of ordinary play.
Why more ways does not mean better odds
This is the part the marketing relies on being misunderstood.
Increasing the number of ways to win increases how often something lands. It does not increase the total return, because return to player is a fixed property of the game’s model. If wins become more frequent, they must become correspondingly smaller — the mathematics has no alternative.
The mechanic redistributes the same return into a different shape: more frequent, smaller base-game wins, with the large outcomes pushed into the feature rounds. It is a change in volatility profile, not in value.
And the returns on these titles are not generally higher. One well-known implementation, applying the mechanic to a long-established British slot brand, publishes a return of 94.995% — slightly below the 95.388% of the original fixed-payline game it was derived from. More ways to win, marginally less money back.
| Original (2006) | Megaways version (2021) | |
| Structure | 25 fixed paylines | Up to 117,649 ways |
| RTP | 95.388% | 94.995% |
| Max win | Modest | Over 20,000× stake |
| Volatility | Medium–high | Medium–high |
What actually changed
The mechanic normally arrives packaged with two others that matter more than the ways count.
Cascading reels. Winning symbols are removed and replaced, allowing consecutive wins from one spin. This creates sequences rather than single outcomes.
Progressive multipliers. A multiplier that increases with each cascade in a chain, which is where the large outcomes come from.
Individual implementations add their own layers on top. The Megaways version of Fluffy Favourites, for instance, adds a horizontal carousel row and a wild multiplier mechanic drawn from the original game’s claw-machine theme — variations on the standard template rather than departures from it.
Together these produce the characteristic profile: long stretches of small returns, occasional very large ones, and a maximum win figure in the tens of thousands of times stake.
What the cascade actually does
Of the mechanics bundled with the variable-reel structure, cascading is the one doing the most work, and it is worth separating from the ways count.
On a winning spin, the symbols forming the win are removed and the cells above drop down to fill the gaps, with new symbols entering from the top. If the new arrangement produces another win, it resolves and the process repeats. A single spin can therefore generate a chain of consecutive wins.
The chain is where the multiplier attaches. Each successive cascade increases a multiplier applied to subsequent wins, so a long chain compounds — which is the mechanism behind the large outcomes, far more than the ways count is.
The presentational effect is significant. A cascade sequence produces sustained motion and repeated win notifications from what began as one wager, which makes a single spin feel considerably more eventful than it is. The total returned is what it is; the experience of receiving it is stretched across several seconds and several separate celebrations.
Nothing about this is dishonest, and the mechanics are fully disclosed. But it is worth recognising that the design is doing two jobs — distributing returns, and shaping how those returns feel.
Reading the maximum
A “over 20,000×” ceiling is genuine and certified. It is also astronomically improbable, and the probability is not published.
The logic is the same as before. Return is fixed; if a large slice is allocated to an extremely rare outcome, that outcome must be extremely rare. For high-ceiling titles the top-outcome probability is typically in the range of one in tens of millions of spins.
So the honest summary of the mechanic is: a genuinely clever redistribution of a slightly lower return into a higher-variance shape, marketed on a number that is really just 7⁶, and a ceiling almost nobody will reach.
The figure to check remains the one in the game’s information screen, and it is the build running at your casino that counts — several studios ship multiple configurations of the same title.
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