Pelican Payday: two modes, two caps, and a small RTP gap between them
Published — UTC
Pelican Payday shows a 96.59% RTP on its English game page. The demo’s game data adds a second mode with a 96.53% RTP, a lower maximum round win, and a much more frequent reported chance of hitting that maximum. This article sets the two modes side by side in pesos. It uses the demo’s figures, labels every calculation, and says where the public material does not settle a point.
What the official page confirms
The Pragmatic Play game page for Pelican Payday lists an RTP of 96.59%. It describes money symbols worth up to 1,000x on the base game, and collect symbols on reel three that pay the total value of the money symbols landing on that spin. Three scatters trigger a bonus with eight free spins that can be retriggered. During the feature, collect symbols can land on any reel and add the money values to a prize pot. The page does not print a maximum round win.
Two modes in the demo data
The demo’s game-initialisation data, read on 2026-10-15, lists two sets of values. The second set is labelled with an _a suffix and an ante-style RTP, and we read it as the ante mode. We could not confirm that label against a second official document.
| Mode | RTP | Max round win | Reported frequency of max | Cap at a ₱20 total bet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular | 96.59% | 5,000x | 1 in 2,506,266 | ₱100,000 |
| Ante (read from _a fields) | 96.53% | 1,000x | 1 in 203,459 | ₱20,000 |
The two modes do not share a cap, so a single figure for the game would hide the difference. The lower cap in the ante mode is paired with a far more frequent reported max result, which is the opposite of what a reader might assume from a lower ceiling.
How often each cap is reached
If each round is independent and the reported frequencies are right, the chance of at least one maximum round in n spins is 1 − (1 − 1/N)n. Our calculation:
| Spins | Regular mode | Ante mode |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 0.0040% | 0.049% |
| 1,000 | 0.040% | 0.49% |
| 10,000 | 0.40% | 4.80% |
Expected loss at each RTP
Expected loss equals total wagered multiplied by one minus the RTP. For ₱10,000 wagered, the regular mode gives an expected loss of ₱341 and the ante mode ₱347. Over 1,000 spins at ₱20 each, that is ₱682 and ₱694. The gap is ₱6 per ₱10,000, which is small compared with the spread of any real session. We report the arithmetic only; the data we read does not explain why the two modes were set this way.
Reading the symbol values and the cap together
The page’s “up to 1,000x” describes money symbols on the screen. The demo’s 5,000x in the regular mode is a round-level maximum. These are different measures, and a reader should not expect the symbol value to equal the round cap. The ante-mode cap of 1,000x matches the largest symbol value named on the page, but we do not know whether that is a coincidence or a design link.
What this article does not show
- No demo or live session was run for this article, so no observed results are reported.
- The ante price is not in the data we read. The ₱20 stake is used only so that the two modes can be compared, not as a real purchase cost.
- The frequencies are the demo’s reported values. We have not checked them against a separate official document.
Use the RTP figures as long-run averages and the caps as ceilings. Play only with money you can afford to lose.