Big Bass Bonanza pokie: play free online and where to play for real money in Australia

Big Bass Bonanza in two minutes

Big Bass Bonanza is a five-reel, ten-line fishing pokie released by Pragmatic Play in December 2020 in partnership with Reel Kingdom, the studio credited on the whole Big Bass series. It is a conventional payline game with a single feature that matters: free spins in which fish carry cash values, a fisherman wild collects every fish on screen, and each fourth wild adds spins and a rising multiplier. It became the studio’s most-copied game, spawning Bigger Bass Bonanza, Big Bass Splash, Christmas and Halloween editions and dozens more. This page covers the original.

How it plays

The grid is 5 × 3 with ten fixed paylines paying left to right. The low symbols are card ranks ten to ace, worth 10x stake for five of a kind. The premiums are a dragonfly, tackle box, fishing rod and floater, then the fish, paying 20x to 200x for five. There are no wilds in the base game. The fisherman scatter appears on every reel and is the only trigger.

Bets run from 0.10 to 250 units per spin, which is a wide band: A$0.10 to A$250 at an AUD casino. The studio rates the game four out of five for volatility. Bigwinboard records the free-spins trigger rate at about 1 in 113 spins and the odds of the 2,100x maximum at roughly 1 in 3.9 million.

Bonus features

Free spins. Three, four or five fisherman scatters award 10, 15 or 20 free spins. Scatters pay nothing on their own beyond the spins.

Money fish. During the feature only, fish symbols land carrying cash values, from small multiples of stake up to 2,000x. A fish on its own does nothing. When the fisherman wild lands anywhere on the reels, he collects the value of every fish visible at that moment and adds it to the win. The wild also substitutes on paylines.

Wild collection. Every fourth wild collected during the feature retriggers it with ten extra spins and steps the multiplier up: 2x after four wilds, 3x after eight, 10x after twelve. The multiplier applies to money-fish collections, not to payline wins. Twelve wilds is the ceiling; nothing further happens after the 10x level. The 2,100x maximum is a hard cap on any single spin: a 2,000x fish collected at 10x does not pay 20,000x, it pays the cap.

Bonus buy. Where the casino enables it, free spins can be bought for 100x stake. Pragmatic Play publishes the bought feature at the same return as the base game.

RTP and volatility

Pragmatic Play’s game page lists Big Bass Bonanza at 96.71%, higher than most of the studio’s catalogue. Bigwinboard also records a 95.67% build. We have not been able to confirm a lower version for this title, but the studio ships most of its games in three tiers, so do not assume 96.71% until you have seen it on the info panel at the casino in real-money mode.

The maximum win of 2,100x stake is low by Pragmatic Play’s standards, and the practical distribution is very different from the scatter-pays games. Because fish values are fixed multiples and the only multiplier is the wild-count ladder, a typical bonus pays what the fish on screen happen to add up to. A feature with no wild at all pays only the payline wins, which happens. At A$1 a spin the cap is A$2,100; at the A$250 maximum it is A$525,000, though casinos apply their own per-game win limits well below that.

Where to play Big Bass Bonanza in Australia and New Zealand

Pragmatic Play is carried by nearly every offshore casino that accepts Australian and New Zealand players, and Big Bass Bonanza is one of the games they promote. Of the casinos we have reviewed, RocketPlay, Spin Samurai, Richard Casino, Bizzo and Golden Crown all name Pragmatic Play in the pokies section of their review and run AUD accounts. Neospin and Need for Spin also list the studio and rank slightly lower.

None of these reviews records the RTP build in use. Spin Samurai’s review states that we have not verified which versions are configured; the same is true for the others. The 96.71% figure is the studio’s headline setting.

Free demo

The demo button above opens Pragmatic Play’s official free-play build of Big Bass Bonanza, served from the studio’s demo server with the display set to Australian dollars. It runs the full game with play-money credits, including the bonus buy, at the studio’s default 96.71% RTP. The demo is the quickest way to understand the wild ladder: buy a few features and count how often twelve wilds actually arrive.

Verdict

Big Bass Bonanza is a plain payline pokie with one well-built feature, and its popularity comes from how readable that feature is: you can see the fish, you can see the wild count, and you know what the next wild will do. The 2,100x cap is modest and the base game is dull, but the 96.71% headline RTP is above the studio’s usual and the bet range is unusually wide. Confirm the build at the casino, and be aware that the many sequels change the RTP and the cap.

FAQ

Is there a Big Bass Bonanza free play version? Yes. Pragmatic Play publishes an official demo, linked above, with play-money credits.

What is the RTP of Big Bass Bonanza? The studio headline is 96.71%. A 95.67% build also exists, and the casino chooses which one it runs.

Can I play Big Bass Bonanza online in Australia? Yes, at offshore casinos that carry Pragmatic Play. Of our reviewed casinos, Spin Samurai, Richard Casino, Bizzo and Golden Crown name the studio in their game libraries.