I recently received this question via email regarding the Lucky Chance feature on Lightning Link, found on other games as the Wager Saver:
A guy playing at the casino showed me a trick on Lightning Link where, if you place a losing bet and no longer have enough credits to place the minimum bet, and it offers you the second chance feature where you may or may not win a free spin at the same bet level, you can decline the second chance feature and then switch the game to a higher denomination, which will cause the game to offer you the second chance feature at the higher denomination.
You can use this trick to get a free spin at a much higher denomination than the bet that triggered the second chance feature. The guy who showed it to me had just used this trick to win $8,000, which was paid out with no problem.
So the question is; could this be illegal or cause the casino to refuse to pay me a big win and/or get me kicked out/banned?
Or, should it be assumed that because it made it into the finished version of the game and doesn’t require modifying the hardware or software in any way, it must be a feature, not a bug, and it’s fair game?
The wager saver chances are proportional in terms of whether you’ll actually get that extra spin, so it’s all above board.
Let’s say you have $5 left over on a $10 bet. Your chances of getting that spin are 50/50, because it’s half the $10 bet. Now if you switch it to a $25 bet, your chances will reduce to 20 percent – $5/$25. Since the chances are proportional, the math works out so the casinos won’t have an issue with this because some percentage of the time you won’t qualify for the spin.
The visual on the picture at the top of this post may help you visualize this – this is not something shown on Lightning Link but it’s the exact same idea.
Once you get the spin, you still have to actually hit something, which is of course not guaranteed either. But I’ve posted a few examples on the site over the years where a wager saver can pay off massively, so it’s also not unheard of.
So fear not – the casino won’t kick you out, and it’s not illegal.
It’s built into the game for a reason, and mathematically will pay out at the same level as anything else on the game over time. Most players aren’t looking for change to be printed out on a ticket, so you get one more chance at something on the game.
Like people who take $100 into the high limit room to do big spins, you’re just taking a big swing at something with some left over money, and on occasional cases it’ll pay off. Of course on most of the cases, it probably won’t.
