Image by Ines Carvalho-Pratt
A one-dollar deposit reaches at least four families of casino game, and the one it mostly misses is blackjack. Slots, roulette, baccarat and bingo-style draws all come in versions whose makers print a starting stake of ten euro cents or less, while the keno, crash and scratch-card titles quoted below carry a printed return but no printed price. On NetEnt’s price list, blackjack and the poker-based card games start at a full euro or more.
In Canada a number of sites accept a single dollar at the cashier, and every game behind that cashier keeps a minimum stake of its own. The stakes and returns below come from the makers’ own game pages: NetEnt’s stake ranges and returns, Evolution’s rules for its live games, and the returns and volatility notes published by Spribe, BGaming, Pragmatic Play, Push Gaming, Wazdan and Hacksaw Gaming.
NetEnt and Evolution give their ranges in euros, and the Bank of Canada’s published daily averages have put a euro between C$1.57 and C$1.63 so far in 2026. Treat those ranges as the shape of each game rather than its price in any particular Canadian lobby.
One Studio’s Price List, Read Across
NetEnt is the most useful starting point, because its game pages print a stake range and a return figure side by side. Eight of its titles span slots, roulette, baccarat, blackjack and two kinds of poker.
| Game | Family | Released | Stake range on NetEnt’s page | Published return |
| Starburst | Video slot | January 2012 | €0.10 to €100 | 96.08% |
| Dead or Alive | Video slot | November 2009 | €0.09 to €18 | 96.82% |
| Roulette Advanced | Digital roulette | October 2017 | €0.10 to €5,000 | 97.30% |
| Roulette Touch | Digital roulette | May 2014 | €1 to €500 | 97.30% |
| Baccarat Professional Series | Digital baccarat | January 2016 | €0.10 to €1,000 | 98.94% |
| Jacks or Better Double Up | Video poker | June 2014 | €1 to €5 | 99.56% |
| Blackjack | Digital blackjack | June 2022 | €1 to €500 | 99.59% |
| Casino Hold’em Poker | Poker table | June 2019 | €10 to €10,000 | 99.18% |
Read down the stake column and the floors fall into two groups: ten euro cents or less for the slots, one of the two roulette games and the baccarat game, and a full euro or more for everything else. The return column runs roughly the other way. The three highest returns all sit in the euro-or-more group.
NetEnt also appears on Evolution’s own list of brands, beside Red Tiger, Big Time Gaming and Nolimit City, so the live tables discussed below come from the same group as the digital figures above.
Blackjack Is Where the Dollar Falls Short
Blackjack is the clearest case. NetEnt’s digital table takes €1 to €500 a hand, and at this year’s exchange rates that one-euro floor alone costs more than the entire deposit. The Jacks or Better video poker shares that floor, and Casino Hold’em asks for €10 before the first card is dealt.
Video poker can also cost more per round than its floor suggests, because the minimum applies to each hand. Evolution’s First Person Video Poker asks for a bet per hand and lets a player add up to 99 extra hands to a single round, across five paytables with Jacks or Better as the default.
Live blackjack is harder to price. Evolution, which says it runs more than 2,000 live tables for licensed operators, describes its classic seven-seat blackjack as running from low stakes upward without printing a figure, and it calls the stakes on Bet Behind, a wager placed behind another player’s seated hand, low as well, again with no number attached.
The company’s pitch to casinos lists flexible betting limits among the reasons to take a dedicated table, which puts the floor of a dedicated live table in the operator’s hands rather than the studio’s.
That turns the useful question from a studio one into a lobby one: what minimum bets do the sites that accept a one-dollar deposit actually set? Gambling.com’s Canadian 1 dollar deposit casino page gives that question a section of its own, recording a minimum bet for two or three low-stakes games at each site it lists. Its authors note that they did not verify a blackjack game below a dollar at any of them.
Roulette and Baccarat Stay Within Reach
Roulette is within a dollar’s reach, although which version a lobby carries counts for more than the game itself. Roulette Advanced takes stakes from ten euro cents, while the older Roulette Touch starts at €1. Both publish the same 97.30% return, which BGaming also lists for its European Roulette, so a tenfold difference in the floor buys no difference in the long-run figure.
A live variant can also reshape the payouts. Evolution’s Lightning Roulette spins a single-zero wheel, strikes one to five lucky numbers each round with payouts between 50x and 500x, and pays 29 to 1 on a straight-up number the lightning misses. BGaming lists 35 times the stake as the top payout on its standard European wheel, so the lightning trades part of every ordinary straight-up win for the chance of a multiplied one.
Like the live blackjack tables, Lightning Roulette and Crazy Time, the money-wheel show Evolution launched in July 2020, come without a published floor. Evolution does publish a 96.08% return for Crazy Time, and says each spin has a one-in-six chance of landing a bonus round.
Baccarat is the surprise on the studio lists. NetEnt’s Baccarat Professional Series opens at ten euro cents with a 98.94% return, the highest figure on its list below the euro line, and BGaming released a Classic Baccarat on 22 September 2026 at 98.76%.
Slots and the Numbers Printed Beside Them
Slots hold the cheapest floor on NetEnt’s list, though only by a euro cent: Dead or Alive starts at nine euro cents and Starburst at ten, with Gonzo’s Quest from twenty and the 243-way Twin Spin from twenty-five. Pragmatic Play publishes 96.50% for Gates of Olympus and 96.71% for Big Bass Bonanza with no stake range beside either. NetEnt’s pages also print two figures that are easy to misread: the return and the hit frequency.
The return, or RTP, is the portion of all the money wagered on a game that its design pays back over an enormous number of rounds. Starburst’s 96.08% describes that long run and nothing shorter. This site’s own explainer on what happens after you press spin makes the same point: RTP does not predict a single session, and every spin is a separate event.
Hit frequency answers a different question, namely how often a round returns anything at all. The studio gives Starburst 23% and Gonzo’s Quest 41%, yet Gonzo’s Quest has the lower return of the two at 95.97%. One number describes how often a game pays and the other how much it pays back in total; neither describes the next twenty spins.
Volatility is the third measure, and Hacksaw Gaming explains it plainly. Its Beam Boys slot has a switch that moves the game between two modes, and the studio’s page defines them: low volatility usually means smaller wins more often, while extreme volatility usually means bigger wins less often.
The rating sits apart from the return, and it too describes the game over a very long run rather than any single session. Wazdan rates its Mighty Wild: Gorilla, released in January 2026, very high in volatility while publishing a 96.2% return, in the same band as the slots above.
Instant Games, Bingo-Style Draws and the Return on Screen
The instant games follow the same pattern, with a return on the page and no price. Spribe’s keno asks players to pick up to ten numbers from 36, pays according to how many of them match, and states a 97% return. Its crash game Aviator states the same figure, while Pragmatic Play lists 95% for its own crash title, Spaceman.
Scratch cards show how far a return can move inside one studio’s catalogue. BGaming lists Capymania Green, released in January 2024, at 97% and Ice Scratch Gold at 90%, both rated very high volatility, and it describes the Green card’s price only as medium, without printing a figure. A seven-point gap between two scratch cards from the same maker is wider than the gap between any slot and wheel quoted here.
Bingo appears in some lobbies as a live draw. Evolution describes Mega Ball as a bingo-style game show in which players set a card value from €0.10 to €100 before 20 balls are drawn from 51, and a final Mega Ball multiplies any line it completes by 5x to 100x. That makes it the only live game in this piece whose maker prints a floor below a dollar.
A return printed on a studio’s website can differ from the version a given lobby runs. Push Gaming’s page for Big Bamboo lists two returns, 96.13% and 94.13%, and says the figure can vary by casino and appears in the game’s own panel and loading screen.
Alberta has written that check into its market: the province’s standards for internet gaming require information on the odds of winning or returns to players, and the value of each credit, to be easy to find before a bet is placed. They also require a notice wherever skill or strategy changes a player’s chances, as it does at a blackjack table.
Those rules reach past the sites. Alberta addresses that part of its standards to every registered iGaming supplier, which under its own definitions covers both the operator of a gaming site and the companies registered to provide goods or services to the market, game developers among them. Ontario’s regulator registers game suppliers too, and Hacksaw’s own site dates its AGCO approval to 24 May 2022.
Whatever the province, a dollar changes how many of these games a player can open, never the percentages printed beside them. Alberta’s regulated market opened on 13 July 2026 to adults aged 18 and over, Ontario’s is open from 19, and the other provinces run their own government sites under their own rules. Both provinces keep a free line staffed at all hours. Ontario callers can dial 1-866-531-2600 for ConnexOntario, and Albertans can dial 1-866-332-2322 for the province’s Addiction Helpline.
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