Roll Ball: How It Works, Odds and Payouts

Roll Ball is a carnival alley-roller. You choose a risk level, send the ball up the lane, and it hops the ramp and drops into a target of five concentric rings with a pocket in each top corner. The ring it lands in sets your payout.

The maths is Ball Drop: How It Works, Odds and Payouts on a 10-row board: the 11 pockets are the 11 buckets, 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. Roll. The result is drawn on our servers and the ball is animated into that pocket.
3. Your bet is paid at the multiplier of the ring or pocket the ball lands in.

The target

The target has five rings, counted from the wide outer ring (ring 0) to the bullseye (ring 4), plus two corner pockets. Each ring is a left half and a right half with the same payout, and the outer ring is a single pocket. That gives 11 pockets. Rings near the middle of the target are the common ones, and the rarest results are at the bullseye and in the corners.

Chances and payouts

The chances add up to 100% and, weighted by the payouts, give 0.97 at every risk level. The shared limits for every game are on the odds page.

Where those chances come from

On a 10-row board, a ball falls left or right at each row with equal chance. There are 2^10 = 1,024 equally likely paths and 11 pockets. The outer ring takes 252 of them (24.61%), ring 1 takes 420, ring 2 takes 240, ring 3 takes 90, the bullseye 20 and the corners 2, one path to each. That is why each corner pocket is hit 1 time in 1,024.

A worked example

You roll at High risk with a 100-coin bet. 65.6% of rolls (outer ring and ring 1) pay almost nothing: under 0.01x and 0.03x. Ring 2 returns 0.71x (71 coins) on 23.4% of rolls. Only about 1 roll in 10 pays more than your bet: ring 3 pays 4.39x (439 coins) on 8.8% of rolls, the bullseye pays 16.00x (1,600 coins) on 1.95% of rolls and the corners pay 43.66x (4,366 coins) on 0.2%. Add them all up, weighted, and you get 97 coins on average.

Max win and caps

The biggest Roll Ball payout is 43.66x, in a corner pocket 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 other Ball Drop games

Roll Ball, Ring Toss: How It Works, Odds and Payouts and Ball Drop: How It Works, Odds and Payouts all use the same binomial buckets. Ball Drop lets you choose from 8 to 16 rows, Ring Toss uses 14 rows and Roll Ball 10. Pinball: how it plays, odds and payouts began as another look at this board but now has its own rules. The family overview is How Ball Drop Games Work: Pins, Buckets and Risk.

Tips that hold up

• The ramp is theatre. A fast or slow roll changes nothing.
• A near-corner is not a near win. The result was drawn before the ball moved.
• Risk level sets the shape. Low keeps every ring between 0.63x and 7.51x; High leaves the two outer rings nearly worthless and pays big for the rest.
• The bullseye is rarer than it looks. It is hit about once in 51 rolls.

Play with limits

The roll is short and the corners are tempting. Decide how many rolls you want before you start, and see Play Safely in Cashout Arcade: Limits and Breaks for tools to set limits. Cashout Arcade is for adults aged 18+, uses virtual coins and has no real-money prizes.