Wheel: How It Works, Odds and Payouts

Wheel is an instant game: you choose how many segments the wheel has and how risky it is, spin, and win whatever the segment under the pointer pays. Some segments pay nothing, some pay a little more than your bet, and at High risk a few pay 9.7x.

Coins are virtual and have no cash value. The segment is chosen on our servers when you tap; the spin is the reveal, so no timing or technique affects it.

How a round works

1. Set your bet.
2. Choose the risk (Low, Medium or High) and the number of segments. The app offers 10, 20 and 30 segments at Low and High, and 10, 20, 30 and 50 at Medium, because the other sizes repeat the same odds.
3. Spin. Every segment is equally likely.
4. The segment under the pointer pays your bet times the number on it; a zero segment loses the bet.

Each risk level has its own wheel, and its tiers are spread out around the rim rather than grouped.

Risk levels

These are the shapes at 10 segments. The multipliers are scaled so each wheel returns 97%.

Odds by wheel size

Segments are whole numbers, so the tier shares round to whole segments. Here is what that does on three sizes. The 50-segment Low and High rows are listed for completeness: the game accepts them, but the app does not offer them because they repeat the 10-segment odds.

Low and High scale perfectly, so their pays do not change with size. Medium does: at 50 segments only 48% of the wheel pays, but each tier pays more, because the big tier rounds to 2 segments instead of 2.5. The return stays at 97% either way (the lowest wheel in the game is 96.997%, because pays are floored to four decimals).

A worked example

You spin the High, 20-segment wheel with a 100-coin bet. Two of the 20 segments pay 9.7x, so your chance of a win is 10%, and a win returns 970 coins. Over 100 spins you expect about 10 wins: 10 x 970 = 9,700 coins returned on 10,000 staked. In an individual 100-spin session, though, there is a 0.9^100, or about one in 37,650, chance of seeing no win at all, and a real chance of long dry spells: 35% of sessions of 10 spins have no win.

Max win and caps

High risk's 9.7x is the biggest Wheel payout, well below the game-wide limits of 50,000x and 250,000,000 coins per round. The odds page lists shared rules.

What is the same as other instant games

Wheel is the plainest random draw in the lobby: a flat list of equally likely outcomes. Dice: How It Works, Odds and Payouts lets you choose the chance; Wheel fixes the shape and lets you choose how risky it is. Slots: How It Works, Odds and Payouts and Scratch: How It Works, Odds and Payouts have the same Low, Medium and High risk language, but with symbol combinations instead of segments. For the idea of swing in a result, see Volatility in Casino Games: Why Results Swing.

Tips that hold up

• Size is cosmetic, apart from Medium. Pick the number of segments you like to look at.
• Risk is the real choice. High means nine losing spins in ten, Low means seven winning spins in ten.
• Winning more often is not winning more. Low risk wins 70% of spins but its biggest prize is 1.94x.
• Past spins say nothing. Each spin uses a fresh random pick.

Play with limits

Fast spins make it easy to lose track of time. Set a limit before you start and see Play Safely in Cashout Arcade: Limits and Breaks for ways to enforce it. Cashout Arcade is for adults aged 18+, uses virtual coins and has no real-money prizes.