Wheel of fortune

You stake from 100 Sulkies to 100,000 according to your balance, the wheel turns, and the marker stops on a segment. Twelve segments, six possible results: ×200, ×50, ×10, ×5, ×2, or nothing.

A warning about the look of the wheel

This is the most important point on this page. The twelve segments are drawn the same size, but they do not have remotely the same probability. The wheel is a piece of staging: the result is drawn before it turns, and then the animation stops on the corresponding segment.

If you count the segments, the ×200 takes up a twelfth of the wheel and therefore seems to come out once in twelve. In reality it comes out four times in ten thousand, that is about once in 2,500 — three hundred times more rarely than the look of it suggests. In the same way, the four grey segments seem to promise a failure once in three, whereas the real frequency is close to seven times in ten.

That gap alone explains the impression that “it never comes up”. It comes up at exactly the expected frequency, which is simply not the one the eye deduces from the drawing.

The exact odds

Out of 10,000 spins, this is what comes out on average:

Win	Out of 10,000 spins	That is roughly
200 times the stake	4	1 spin in 2,500
50 times	20	1 in 500
10 times	80	1 in 125
5 times	360	1 in 28
2 times	2,600	1 in 4
nothing	6,936	close to seven spins in ten

About one spin in three brings in something, and in the vast majority of cases it is the simple doubling of the stake.

What those figures mean

Add them up: out of 10,000 stakes, the wheel returns 9,600. That is 96 % of the stakes redistributed and 4 % that stay with the game. The three little games redistribute the same share, to the figure; none is more advantageous, only the form of the chance differs.

Those 4 % are the whole subject. Over ten spins they mean nothing. But the more you play, the closer your result comes to the average — that is the law of large numbers, and it makes no exception. A thousand spins at 100 Sulkies is 100,000 Sulkies staked and about 96,000 got back. Losing, in those conditions, is not bad luck: it is the result announced in advance.

And insisting does not force luck. The ×200 comes out four times in ten thousand. Spinning a hundred times does not give you a hundred times more chance of hitting it, but about 4 %. Each turn is drawn independently of the previous one: the wheel has no memory, owes you nothing, and does not become “ripe” because you have lost ten times. There is neither a run to chase nor a right moment.

So this game is not a way of winning Sulkies: over time, it costs them. See it for what it is, a few minutes' entertainment — something to fill the wait for a race's results.

“Last big prizes”

The table at the bottom gives the five finest wins of the last twenty-four hours. It is accurate, but remember what it does not show: the thousands of losing spins of the same day. Seeing winners does not mean that wins are frequent, only that there are a lot of players.

Stopping, and coming back if you want to

The I want to disable the games of chance button is placed right at the top, before the game, and that is not by chance. A wheel that turns, an animation, an immediate result: everything about it invites one more spin. If you feel that you are spending more time or Sulkies on it than you meant to, one click takes the three games off the menu.

The gesture is not irreversible: the Play little games of chance box, in My account then General options, brings them back when you decide. Your choice follows you from one world to another: it is copied over at the moment you connect to another world.

In version 6, disabling was final. It no longer is — but the box has been deliberately put far from the game, far enough for one not to come back to it on a whim.