Ring Toss: How It Works, Odds and Payouts

Ring Toss is a carnival game with a rack of 15 bottles on three shelves. You pick a risk level, toss the ring, and it lands on one bottle. The bottle sets your payout, and some bottles pay far more than others.

It plays like Ball Drop: How It Works, Odds and Payouts: each bottle is one of the 15 buckets of a 14-row Ball Drop board, so the odds and pay tables are Ball Drop's own. Coins are virtual and have no cash value.

How a round works

1. Set your bet and choose Low, Medium or High risk.
2. Toss. The server draws the result and the ring is animated onto that bottle.
3. Your bet is paid at the multiplier of the bottle the ring lands on.

The rack

There are 6 bottles on the back shelf, 5 in the middle and 4 at the front, each standing in the gap between two bottles on the shelf behind. The most common bottles (and the smallest payouts) are in the middle of the rack. The rarest are on the outside, and the two rarest of all sit on the back corners.

Every bottle, its chance and its payout

The 15 bottles correspond to the 15 buckets of a 14-row board. Each pair of mirror-image bottles has the same chance and pay.

The centre bottle and its neighbours together catch about 58% of tosses, and at Medium or High risk they pay a fraction of your bet. The rarer bottles carry the rest of the 97% return. The shared limits for all games are on the odds page.

A worked example

You toss a ring at Medium risk with a 100-coin bet. The most likely result is the centre bottle (20.95%), which pays 0.22x, so you lose 78 coins. The next most likely are the two bottles on either side of the centre on the middle shelf, 18.33% each, paying 0.26x. Only the four outermost bottles (the back corners and the ends of the middle shelf) pay more than 20x, and between them they are hit 1 toss in about 546 (0.18%). A back-corner bottle pays 36.41x (3,641 coins), and either corner comes up about 1 toss in 8,192. Weighted by their chances, all the bottles add up to a 97-coin average return.

Max win and caps

The biggest Ring Toss payout is 89.59x, for a back-corner bottle at High risk. That is far below the game-wide limits of 50,000x the bet and 250,000,000 coins per round.

What is the same as Ball Drop, and what is not

The chance of each bottle is exactly the binomial chance of a bucket on a 14-row Ball Drop board, and the pay tables are Ball Drop's 14-row tables. What differs is the layout: Ball Drop: How It Works, Odds and Payouts shows a row of buckets with the edges at the ends, while Ring Toss maps them onto a three-shelf rack, so the two highest pays are on the back corners. Roll Ball: How It Works, Odds and Payouts is the 10-row version with ring targets. For the shared idea, see How Ball Drop Games Work: Pins, Buckets and Risk.

Tips that hold up

• Do not aim. The ring goes where the server says it goes.
• A bottle is not "nearly" a corner. A toss landing next to the corner bottle in the animation is not a near miss; the result was already decided.
• Risk is the only choice. Low keeps most bottles close to 1x; High pays almost nothing on the middle bottles.
• The centre is where the money goes. About one toss in five is the centre bottle.

Play with limits

Quick tosses with large corner prizes are easy to repeat. Decide how many tosses you want before you start, and see Play Safely in Cashout Arcade: Limits and Breaks for tools. Cashout Arcade is for adults aged 18+, uses virtual coins and has no real-money prizes.