Ball Bingo
The ball-drop bingo of the medal corner. Bet up to three medals, shoot the balls through the pins, and every numbered pocket marks its number on your 3 × 3 card. Lines pay, more lines pay more, and the exact odds of every one are on the Odds tab.
- 1 line: 2
- 2 lines: 4
- 3 lines: 10
- 4 lines: 25
- 5 lines: 50
- 6 lines: 100
- FULL CARD: 500
Choose a bet and press START.
Keys: Space or Enter starts and launches · S skips · A auto · F 2× speed · 1 2 3 choose the bet
Medals are for playing the games on this site only. They are not money: they cannot be bought, cashed out or exchanged for anything.
These are your medals from the Medal Game Center, shared by every machine there. The daily bonus and the reset are on its front page. Go to the Medal Game Center
What a card pays
| Lines | 1 bet | 2 bet | 3 bet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 line | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| 2 lines | 4 | 8 | 12 |
| 3 lines | 10 | 20 | 30 |
| 4 lines | 25 | 50 | 75 |
| 5 lines | 50 | 100 | 150 |
| 6 lines | 100 | 200 | 300 |
| FULL CARD | 500 | 1,000 | 1,500 |
This visit
- Games
- 0
- Medals played
- 0
- Medals won
- 0
- Ahead / behind
- 0
- Biggest win
- 0
- Return seen
- —
- Exact return
- 89.974%
The exact odds
Every pocket has a published weight out of 144. Each ball goes into one of the pockets open at that moment, with a chance of its weight over the weights of all the open ones. A number with a ball in it is closed for the rest of the game; the FREE pockets close once they have given 3 free balls; CHANCE closes once it holds its ball; OUT never closes.
The figures below are not counted from games played. They are worked out exactly, by dynamic programming over every state a game can be in: the numbers marked (512 of them), the balls still to come, the free balls given and whether CHANCE TIME has come. A game’s return is what every one of those states leads to, each by its chance.
- Return to player
- 89.974%
- Kept by the machine
- 10.026%
- Games that pay
- 27.00%
- Full card
- 0.00784% (1 / 12,747)
- CHANCE TIME comes
- 8.22%
- At least one free ball
- 22.21%
- Balls shot a game, on average
- 5.88
- Numbers marked a game, on average
- 3.31
- Spread of a game’s pay (σ, per medal bet)
- 5.60
- Games for ±1 point
- 1,205,812
How many games before the return you see is within one point of the exact return, 95 times in 100. The rare full card makes it a long wait.
Games with CHANCE TIME bring back 44.4% of everything the machine returns.
Lines at the end of a game
The chance of a game ending with each count of lines, what it pays a medal bet, and what it adds to the return. Seven lines cannot be held on a 3 × 3 card: the eighth comes with the seventh.
| Lines | Chance | 1 game in | Pays | Adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 72.999% | 1.4 | 0 | — |
| 1 | 21.937% | 4.6 | ×2 | 43.87% |
| 2 | 3.650% | 27.4 | ×4 | 14.60% |
| 3 | 0.969% | 103 | ×10 | 9.69% |
| 4 | 0.278% | 360 | ×25 | 6.94% |
| 5 | 0.101% | 988 | ×50 | 5.06% |
| 6 | 0.0589% | 1,698 | ×100 | 5.89% |
| 7 | cannot happen | |||
| 8★ | 0.00784% | 12,747 | ×500 | 3.92% |
| Total | 100.000% | 89.974% | ||
★ The full card: all eight lines.
The pockets
Each pocket’s weight, and its chance while every pocket is open (the first ball’s chances).
| Weight | First ball | |
|---|---|---|
| OUT ← | 24 / 144 | 16.67% |
| Number 1 | 8 / 144 | 5.56% |
| Number 2 | 9 / 144 | 6.25% |
| Number 3 | 10 / 144 | 6.94% |
| Number 4 | 11 / 144 | 7.64% |
| Number 5 | 12 / 144 | 8.33% |
| Number 6 | 11 / 144 | 7.64% |
| Number 7 | 10 / 144 | 6.94% |
| Number 8 | 9 / 144 | 6.25% |
| Number 9 | 8 / 144 | 5.56% |
| OUT → | 24 / 144 | 16.67% |
| FREE ← | 3 / 144 | 2.08% |
| CHANCE | 2 / 144 | 1.39% |
| FREE → | 3 / 144 | 2.08% |
The rules the figures follow
- A game starts with 5 balls, and ends when they run out or every number is marked.
- A ball in a numbered pocket marks its number and stays: no number comes twice in a game.
- FREE: the ball comes back with one more ball, so there is one more to come than before it was shot. At most 3 a game.
- CHANCE: the ball stays, and 4 more balls come (CHANCE TIME). Once a game.
- OUT: the ball is gone.
- The card pays by the lines it holds when the game is over, times the medals bet.
The card
Every row, column and diagonal adds up to 15. The middle number, 5, is in four lines; each corner in three; each edge in two.
How the ball finds its pocket
The pocket of every ball of a game is drawn when START is pressed, from the chances above, and nothing after that changes it.
The ball is then shot up the lane at a strength the machine picks, runs round the arch until it is too slow to hold to it, and falls under gravity through the pins, bouncing off each one: a physics model of the field, worked out without being drawn. The machine tries strengths until a ball comes down in the pocket drawn, and shows that flight. Nothing about the flight is invented except the strength of the shot.
The field was set so that a ball shot at any strength lands about as often in each kind of pocket as the chances say: the flights you see are the field’s own.
2× shows the same flights at twice the pace. The pockets were drawn at START, so it changes nothing about the odds.
What it follows
- The bingo pinballs of the 1950s: a field of 25 numbered holes, five balls a game, a ball staying in its hole, three, four or five in a line paying more.
- The ball bingo machines of the Japanese medal corner that followed them: 25 numbered holes and a hole that gives the ball back, five balls a game and up to three extra balls, three, four and five in a line paying from 4 to 600 medals.
- The big bingo machines of today’s arcades: five balls a game into numbered holes, a hole that shoots the ball again, features that add lines and balls; and bingo bonus games played on a 3 × 3 card.
- Medal games are said to be set to give back about 85 to 95% of the medals played; this one gives back about 90%.
FLOOR JACKPOT
+ 1% of every medal played goes to the floor jackpot: the site adds 1 medal for every 100 you play, on top of what you play. Nothing is taken out of it, so this machine’s own return is exactly as shown.
Each medal played is also a 1 in 150,000 chance to win the whole pool, which starts again at 1,000 medals once it is won. In the long run it brings back 1.67 medals for every 100 played, but only in the long run: most players never win it.
It is for players who are signed in and have joined the floor, on the first 20,000 medals each plays in a day (Japan time) at the linked machines, with one floor jackpot a day at most.
Like the rankings, the floor jackpot is for fun. The medals played that feed it are what players’ browsers report: the site checks each report against what that machine allows, but it cannot prove it. The draw itself is made on the site’s server, never in a browser.
Linked machines: Medal Pusher, Slot Machine, Calico Janken, Roulette & Martingale, Three Card Poker, Big Catch Harbor, Mini Turf Racing, Ball Bingo, Star Festival Big Wheel, High & Low Ladder, Moonlit Sic Bo, Whale Isle Sugoroku, Candy Shop Medal Maze, Video Keno, Hot Spring Smart Ball, Goldfish Lantern Pachinko, Cherry Blossom Carousel, Onsen Shooting Gallery.