Slots in which cash symbols lock in place and a short run of respins collects their values. Five hold and win games compared, from Wolf Gold and 9 Coins to Royal Joker and the Money Train series.
Lock the Coins, Keep the Respins Coming
A hold and win round starts when enough cash symbols land in one spin. They lock where they are, and you get three respins in which only more cash symbols can appear. Every new one locks too and puts the count back to three, so the round runs until three respins pass with nothing new or every position is full. At the end, the values on the locked symbols are added up and paid.
On Pragmatic Play’s Wolf Gold, six or more money symbols start it, the values go up to 100x, and filling all 15 positions wins the 1,000x Mega Jackpot. Each studio gives the round its own name: Money Respin at Pragmatic Play, Hold the Jackpot at Wazdan, the Money Cart at Relax Gaming and plain Hold and Win at Playson.
Five Hold and Win Games Side by Side
Every figure comes from the studio’s own game page or release, with the biggest top prize first. A dash means the studio does not give that figure there.
| Game | Studio | Name of the round | RTP | Max win |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Money Train 4 | Relax Gaming | Money Cart | – | 150,000x |
| Money Train 2 | Relax Gaming | Money Cart | – | 50,000x |
| 9 Coins | Wazdan | Hold the Jackpot | 96.06% | 500x |
| Wolf Gold | Pragmatic Play | Money Respin | 96.01% | – |
| Royal Joker: Hold and Win | Playson | Hold and Win | – | – |
Pragmatic gives Wolf Gold’s 1,000x Mega Jackpot but no overall top prize, and the Relax and Playson pages carry no return figure, so the game’s information screen at your casino is the place to check it.
Money Train 4
The last of Relax Gaming’s Wild West bandit series arrived in 2023 with a 150,000x top prize, a record for the studio, and Relax calls it high volatility. Its Money Cart round opens with three spins, and any of 20 special symbols can land and change how the round plays: the Arms Dealer turns bonus symbols into feature symbols, the Unlocker opens new rows and the Upgrader makes feature symbols persistent. Our Money Train 4 guide covers the base game too, and more frontier games are on our Wild West slots page.
Money Train 2
Three or more scatters start the Money Cart here, again with three spins. The characters do the work: the Collector adds up every value on screen and adds his own, the Payer adds her value to the pot and the Sniper doubles the values of up to eight symbols. Persistent characters act on every spin, a Necromancer brings spent ones back, and when a reel fills up the game adds another column. The top prize is 50,000x. The rest of the studio’s catalogue is on our Relax Gaming page.
9 Coins
Wazdan’s 2022 game puts nine single-symbol reels in a 3×3 block, and its base game has no prizes at all: everything is paid in the Hold the Jackpot round. Cash Infinity symbols stick to the reels to make that round easier to reach, and in it, Cash symbols pay 1x to 5x, Collectors gather the values and multiply them by 1x to 9x, and Jackpot Mystery symbols turn into the Mini, Minor or Major. Filling every reel wins the Grand Jackpot of 500x, which is also the game’s top prize. Wazdan rates it medium-high at 96.06%, and its chilli-pepper Volatility Levels let you choose between more frequent smaller wins and rarer bigger ones.
Wolf Gold
Pragmatic Play runs Wolf Gold’s Money Respin in both the base game and the free spins, so the round can start inside another feature. Money symbols carry values up to 100x, three jackpots sit on top, and a full screen of 15 money symbols pays the 1,000x Mega Jackpot. It returns 96.01%. Our Wolf Gold guide goes through the free spins, and the studio’s other games are on our Pragmatic Play page.
Royal Joker: Hold and Win
Playson’s 2023 follow-up to Royal Coins and Royal Coins 2 keeps the classic fruits on a 3×3 grid with five lines, with coins as the bonus symbols. The new piece is the Joker, a wild in the main game that brings multipliers for the coins you collect in the bonus. Other games with cherries and sevens are on our fruit slots page.
Collectors, Persistent Symbols and Growing Grids
The plain round only adds up the coins. The games above build on it in three ways:
- Collectors gather the values on other symbols into one, multiplied on 9 Coins and with the Collector’s own chips added on Money Train 2.
- Persistent symbols act on every spin instead of once, which is what the Upgrader adds on Money Train 4.
- Growing grids give the round more room: Money Train 2 adds a column when a reel fills, and Money Train 4’s Unlocker opens new rows.
The more of these a round has, the further apart its small and big results can be. Respin features that do not lock coins have their own page, respins slots.
A Base Game That Pays Nothing, in Pounds
9 Coins shows the format at its purest. At 96.06%, 600 spins an hour at £1 cost about £24 on average, about £118 at the £5 limit for players aged 25 and over, and about £47 at the £2 limit for those aged 18 to 24. Because the base game has no prizes, every spin that does not start the round costs its full stake, so real sessions swing far from that average in both directions.
Wazdan and Relax sell a direct route into these rounds in some markets. British players never see that button, because a slot offered in Great Britain cannot sell entry to a feature, so the coins always have to arrive by themselves.
Hold and Win or Free Spins?
Both are ways of delivering a bonus, but they pay differently. A hold and win round pays the values printed on the locked symbols, so you can watch the total build up as the coins arrive. Free spins replay the reels with extras such as wilds or multipliers and pay through the paytable, so the result is harder to read until the round ends. Wolf Gold carries both: its free spins join reels 2, 3 and 4 together, and the Money Respin can still land during them.
