Scratch ticket
You stake, you scratch, and you see straight away whether the ticket is a winner. The stake goes from 100 Sulkies to 100,000, the higher steps appearing only if your balance allows them.
A banner is then displayed on the ticket, and it is worth knowing what it does exactly.
- Cash in, after a win, does nothing but refresh the balance displayed. The Sulkies were paid to you at the moment the ticket was bought: you can leave the page without clicking, nothing will be lost.
- Play again, after a loss, is simply the way of getting a new ticket at the same stake. So it is a new purchase, and a new debit — not a second chance offered.
The exact odds
Here they are in full, hiding nothing. Out of 10,000 tickets bought, this is what comes out on average:
| Win | Out of 10,000 tickets | That is roughly |
|---|---|---|
| 128 times the stake | 1 | 1 ticket in 10,000 |
| 64 times | 3 | 1 in 3,300 |
| 32 times | 10 | 1 in 1,000 |
| 16 times | 35 | 1 in 290 |
| 8 times | 100 | 1 in 100 |
| 4 times | 400 | 1 in 25 |
| 2 times | 1,500 | 1 in 7 |
| the stake returned | 3,000 | 1 in 3 |
| nothing | 4,951 | one ticket in two |
So a little more than one ticket in two brings in something — but in 3,000 cases out of 10,000, that “something” is exactly your stake, returned. The real wins concern one ticket in five.
What those figures mean
Add up the middle column multiplied by the wins: out of 10,000 stakes, the game returns 9,600. In other words 96 % of the stakes are redistributed, and 4 % stay with the game. That is announced on the page, and it can be checked against the table above.
Those 4 % are the whole subject. Over a handful of tickets, they mean nothing: you may come across a ×32 and walk away well ahead. But the more you play, the closer your result comes to the average — that is the law of large numbers, and it knows no exception. Over a thousand tickets at 100 Sulkies, you will have staked 100,000 Sulkies and will get about 96,000 back. The loss is not a stroke of bad luck: it is the expected result.
And playing a lot does not force luck. The top prize comes out one ticket in ten thousand. Buying a hundred tickets does not give you a one-in-a-hundred chance of hitting it, but about a one-in-a-hundred chance altogether — roughly 1 %. Each ticket is drawn independently of the previous ones: there is no ticket that “is bound to come up”, no run to chase, no moment more favourable than another.
That is why 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 of the page gives the five finest wins of the last twenty-four hours. It is honest, but remember what it does not show: the thousands of losing tickets bought over the same time. Seeing winners does not indicate 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 right at the top of the page, before the game itself, and that is not by chance. These games are quick, repetitive and effortless: characteristics that make it easy to spend more time and Sulkies on them than one meant to. If you feel it coming, 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.
The other two games work on the same principle and redistribute the same share: Slot machine and Wheel of fortune.