Gates of Olympus Bonus Round

There are three doors into the free spins round: wait for it, improve the odds with Ante Bet, or buy it outright. What each one costs your budget is very different.

Free Demo

Trying the Bonus Round in Demo

See how the buy button and the Ante Bet switch behave without putting money at risk. The demo balance is virtual and nothing can be withdrawn — but the mechanics are identical.

Open the GameGates of Olympus • Pragmatic Play • no real money

Play for Real MoneyThe demo loads from Pragmatic Play’s own server with a virtual balance. No deposit and no registration.

In this game the word bonus covers two separate things, and they are constantly confused. The first is the game’s own free spins round — opened by Scatter symbols, carrying no wagering requirement, paying straight into your balance. The second is whatever promotion your site happens to run, governed entirely by the operator. This page leans on the first.

How the Bonus Round Opens

The trigger symbol is the Scatter carrying the portrait of Zeus. Four or more landing together start 15 free spins. Where they sit does not matter; as everywhere else in this game, the count is read rather than the position.

At the moment of triggering, the Scatters also pay on their own: four give 3 times the total bet, five give 5 times and six give 100 times. That payment is separate from the bonus round and lands in the balance before the spins start.

There are three routes into the round and their costs differ sharply. The table below compares how the three approaches behave on the same budget.

How Buying the Bonus Works

The left panel carries the purchase price and the Double Chance switch.

The Buy Free Spins button on the purple panel beside the reels takes you straight into the round. The figure on it is not fixed: it shows a hundred times your current stake and updates the instant you change your bet.

The Double Chance switch just below it is the Ante Bet. Turned on, it raises the stake by 25% and increases how often Scatters appear. Worth noting: the two features cannot be used together — with Ante Bet active, the buy button is disabled.

Press buy and a confirmation screen appears, the amount is deducted and 15 spins start immediately. Those spins follow exactly the same rules as a naturally triggered round: multipliers accumulate, three Scatters add five spins, and the ceiling is still 5,000x.

Worth knowing: if a purchased round comes up short, the 100x you paid is gone. On a balance that cannot absorb at least fifteen to twenty purchases, this option can end a session in a single round.

The Maths of Buying: What to Expect

Providers tune the buy option so its theoretical return stays very close to the base game. In practice that means paying a hundred units and expecting roughly ninety-six back on average. The word average is doing the work there — you will not see it in any single round.

The large majority of purchased rounds close below their cost. A small minority, carried by accumulated multipliers, pay back many times the price, and that minority alone holds the average up. Buying, in other words, converts the same expected value into a far sharper distribution.

The practical consequence is straightforward. If you are treating a purchase as a one-off experiment, accept in advance that disappointment is the likely outcome. If you intend to do it regularly, your balance needs to absorb at least fifteen purchases; otherwise the budget runs out before you ever reach the good tail of the distribution.

It helps to watch the same money spent two different ways. You have a balance of 1,500 units and your stake is set to 1. Take the purchase route and that balance buys fifteen rounds: most close between 20 and 60 units, one or two edge past their cost, and realistically a single round produces anything worth talking about. The session is over in twenty minutes. Spread the same balance across 1,500 standard spins and the expected return is similar in cash terms, but you collect small payouts the whole way and the game can last an evening. What you are choosing here is pace, not mathematics.

Choosing Between Ante Bet and Buying

Ante Bet pays 25% more on every round to lift the frequency of Scatters. The theoretical return barely moves in this mode; what changes is how many rounds your budget covers and how often the bonus appears.

Ask yourself one question when deciding: how many rounds does your budget cover? Above a hundred, Ante Bet genuinely lifts your chance of reaching the bonus by a meaningful margin. Switching it on with a twenty-round budget does nothing except burn the balance faster.

Buying is a different decision altogether. There you are not purchasing the game, you are purchasing the outcome: skipping the rhythm of the base game, the waiting and the small wins to land directly in the bonus. That makes sense for players who already know the game and care only about the variance of the bonus round.

A final caution about the buy button: using it over and over changes nothing in the game’s maths, yet it is the habit that does the most damage. Purchases are independent of one another, so three disappointing rounds in a row are not an argument that the fourth is owed to you. If you intend to buy at all, fix the number before the session starts — five, ten, whatever the budget carries — and stop there regardless of how those rounds went.

How Multipliers Build Up in Free Spins

This is where the bonus round truly parts ways with the base game. In a normal round the orbs that drop are summed, applied to that round and cleared. During free spins every orb joins a shared pool that is kept until the round ends.

Take an example. If the first three spins drop orbs worth 5x, 10x and 25x, the pool stands at 40x. If the fourth spin produces a raw win of 3 units from the paytable, it pays out as 120. Wins late in a round look enormous not because the symbols changed, but because the pool grew.

That is also why the five spins added by three Scatters are so valuable: they buy time without resetting the pool. The Gates of Olympus 1000 edition pushes the same logic further, raising orb values as high as 1000x — we went through the differences one by one on the edition comparison page.

Do Not Confuse This With Casino Promotions

The in-game bonus round and an operator’s welcome bonus are two completely different things. Treating them as one is the most common mistake made on this subject.

If you do take a promotion, read three lines in particular: the wagering multiple, the maximum bet allowed while wagering, and the contribution percentage for slots. Exceeding the bet cap during wagering voids the bonus and any winnings from it at most sites — and that is usually applied automatically by the system.

How Often the Bonus Arrives

There is no exact figure to give, but there is a range. At a standard stake, four Scatters landing together happens on average once every few hundred spins; with Ante Bet active that interval narrows noticeably.

It is worth being precise about what average means. An average of two hundred spins does not mean a bonus every two hundred spins. Two bonuses in a row and eight hundred spins without one are both ordinary results of the same distribution. Because the game does not remember previous rounds, a long drought never improves the odds of the next spin.

The practical conclusion: if you are playing with the bonus round as your goal, your budget has to be split so it covers at least a few hundred rounds. Waiting for a bonus on a fifty-round balance is, mathematically, a plan that usually ends in frustration. Either reduce the stake to increase the round count, or change the expectation from the outset.

One more detail: trigger frequency and round value pull in opposite directions. Editions that deliver the bonus more often — Super Scatter, for instance — pay more modestly per round. Because the provider keeps total return fixed, greater frequency means smaller size. There is no version that offers both.

After a Good Bonus Round

When the round closes the balance has grown, and this is the most decisive moment of the session. What you decide immediately after a win determines how much of it stays with you.

Raising the stake is the usual reflex, and the reasoning sounds sensible enough: there is more in the balance now, so a bigger bet is affordable. Nothing in the game has changed, though. You are playing the same distribution for larger amounts, which only shortens the time it takes to hand the win back. Keeping the bet at the figure you settled on before the round is the least interesting response available, and the one that actually protects the balance.

The second frequent error is playing the entire win back in the same session. A simple rule prevents it: move a fixed share of the bonus win out of play and continue with the rest. Half is a reasonable proportion. It will not make the win bigger, but it raises the odds of the session closing in profit considerably.

Three Common Mistakes

The round itself runs automatically; what shapes the outcome are the decisions made before and after it.

• Raising the stake to force a trigger. The probability of Scatters landing is independent of your bet. A bigger stake only raises the cost of every round and shortens the life of your budget.
• Turning to the buy button after losses. Spending 100x after a long losing run is the most expensive form of chasing. The game does not remember previous rounds, so this one has exactly the same chance as any other.
• Replaying bonus winnings in the same session. After a good round the balance grows and the urge to raise the stake grows with it. Sticking to the stake you set beforehand is the simplest way to protect a win.

If you have not yet looked at the core mechanics and the paytable, the symbol and multiplier sections on the Gates of Olympus home page are worth reading first — the bonus round makes much more sense with that background. For players on a phone, we showed how the buy panel looks on a small screen on the mobile page.

Bonus Questions

If you have not yet worked through the core mechanics and the paytable, the symbol and multiplier sections on the Gates of Olympus home page are worth reading first — the bonus round makes far more sense with that background. For players on a phone, we showed where the buy panel sits on a small screen on the mobile page.

Related Pages