The gambling industry has succeeded in developing the ultimate gambling game – one that players can’t get enough of, that makes casinos lots of money, and keeps players playing even after losing, still hopeful of landing that big win.
Enter multiplier roulette, a genre kicked into existence by Lightning Roulette in 2018. The promise of getting a 500x win if both the ball and the random multiplier land on your chosen number is an elusive goal the players have kept chasing, with limited success, for years now.
More than 20 live dealer roulette games with multipliers exist today, some of them promising ridiculous wins of 5,000x and more. The genre has also expanded to other traditional casino games such as blackjack or baccarat, turning them from even-money games into action-packed games where you can get a massive payout if lucky.
Visit the links above to learn more about this type of casino game, as reviewed by the #1 worldwide live dealer game reviewer Neil Walker from LiveCasinoComparer.com, who panned the original game upon release.
The thrill of the chase keeps players going
The greater the promised reward, the greater the thrill of the chase, and the more likely a player is to continue playing through losses. Casino game developers know this, which is why most slot machines advertise payouts of 10,000x or more even if the product sheet says the chance of hitting that payout is 1 in 150 million.
The first multiplier game, Lightning Roulette, kept the multipliers at a shy 500x, but the other developers have since added larger payouts with games where volatility goes through the roof to compensate. Some have added bonus rounds, extra roulette wheels, and even elements from other casino games, all increasing the fun but also narrowing the funnel you must go through in order to get the maximum win.
The mathematics of the game are misunderstood
While Lightning Roulette promises a big 500x multiplier, it is in fact not a multiplier of the normal straight-up number win as you might assume, but a total payout. Normal straight-up wins pay 29:1, and the highest possible Lucky Number win is 499:1. That would be a 16.7x win multiplier on the normal Lightning Roulette straight-up number payout or a mere 13.9x multiplier of a standard roulette straight-up win!
However, calling the game what it is—a game of roulette that pays 13.9x better if you’re lucky enough to land that win once every 200 spins—would hardly be good marketing. The game developers and the casinos are happy to focus on the maximum prize instead and completely ignore how often it comes along. That is left to the imagination.
Which roulette actually pays better?
A quick glance at the last 500 rounds of Lightning Roulette—all the players share the outcome of the same spin—shows that the ball landed on the number that had a 500x multiplier assigned to it three times. There were a total of 25 multiplier wins.
A standard game of roulette would have paid 18,000 units to winners. Lightning Roulette pays 30 units instead of 36 on a straight-up number, which means it pays 15,000 units, with the remainder being paid by the multipliers.
In the last 500 rounds, at the time of writing, Lightning Roulette actually paid 3,400 units through multipliers, compared to the 3,000 that it had to pay to match normal roulette, so the game actually paid better than its traditional counterpart.
However, to guarantee catching every single one of the multiplier wins, a person would have to wager 18,500 units and would still come up 100 units short even in this very good period for the game.
Realistic chance to hit the multiplier
If a person placed a bet on only one number instead, the chance of that number winning and having a win multiplier on it is minuscule. With an average of three Lucky Numbers per round, 3 / 37 = 8.10% of the numbers get assigned a multiplier. This reduces the usual chance to win by placing a straight-up number bet, which is 2.70%, to a mere 0.22%.
You can expect to hit a multiplier—any of the five available from 50x to 500x—once every 500 spins.
Online or Land Based?
Multiplier Roulette initially launched at online casinos, where the take up has been everywhere. The games have become the most popular roulette games to play online, with every casino having one or more variants.
Land-based casinos have been slow on the uptake, and it’s a challenge to find these games. You certainly won’t find them in Las Vegas or Macau.
But the good news is there is a version of Lightning Roulette built specifically for land-based casinos and you’ll find it at the Hippodrome Casino in London.
The game uses an Auto Roulette wheel with a normal betting grid and Croupier in attendance to take the bets and distribute the winnings. A Random Number Generator is used to generate the multipliers and assign them to numbers on the wheel.
It’s become the most popular table in the casino!
Conclusion
Gambling games are always designed to benefit the house, of course, but it’s important to dissect every single game’s math engine and probabilities to know what the player can realistically hope to win. This is why game review resources that make sense of the games, such as LiveCasinoComparer, are the casino player’s best friend. Whenever you see a promised payout of 10,000x in some game, the question to ask is—how often does it come along?