Lady Luck, Divination... whatever you want to call her. This is a mini game that they introduced a while back and lots of data has been collected, but a full breakdown has never been attempted. For the most part, I ignore the first stage because it is designed as bait and the odds are drastically different. At most, the numbers in the table may be skewed 100 gold, depending on how you deal with the realities of the first stage.
Playing for Gold
The first table summarizes playing the fortune teller to acquire gold. The first 5 columns show the stage, cost to play, odds of winning gold, the average gold you would win (if you did this many times) and the average gold you will lose. You can see that only the first stage has a good chance of winning gold every time, and if you did it 100 times or more, you will average a gain of roughly 80 gold per play, or 8000 gold gained.
The next 4 columns show the total cost to play if you add them up, your average winnings and the payout for each stage if you win that one.
A common strategy is to play until you win and then quit.
The odds are 1 in 4. The trap that many fall into is assuming that if you lost the first 3, the 4th has to be a win. BUT, these are independent events, so your chances of winning any stage is not affected by past events. It is still 1 in 4.
With these odds, if you play 4 times you "should" win once. In reality, you have a 68% chance of winning at least one stage, or a 32% chance of not winning any. As you play more stages, your odds of winning at least 1 increases.
The last column show your chances of not winning any stage (excluding the first stage). There is a 7.5% chance you can play every stage and lose 105,900 gold.
At best, with the play till you win strategy, you will gain your gold back, but the consolation is that you pick up items along the way.
The only way to get ahead and gain "big" gold is to win at least 2 of the final 9 stages. You have about a 37% chance of winning more than 3000 gold, but you need to be willing to risk losing approximately 102,000 gold to get there.
As with most things involving gambling, know your limits and play within them.
Playing for Items
The claim from Big Farm was that "free" mallets are available as rewards from the fortune teller. The second table calculates the cost of winning any one of 5 or 6 goods available (cash, tickets, mallets, coupons, gas, seaweed, etc). To get an exact item, like mallets or buckets, you have a 1 in 8 chance (12.5%) of getting them, so you need to play 8 times... (or more like 200 times to win them 25 times). Again, we are working with averages.
I will point out 4 things:
- If you are gambling for gas, 2 single day gas cans from the trader is 900 gold each. 2 single day gas cans from the fortune teller is 3,480 gold each.
- 150 mallets from the balloon is 9,500 gold. 125 mallets from the fortune teller is 59,360 gold.
- $100 USD will get 440,000 gold from a super sale, earning 7-8,000 buckets from the fortune teller. $100 USD in a material package will get you 15,000 buckets.
You have a 1 in 116,507 chance of turning 200 gold into buckets.
Conclusion
This is a bit of an assumption, but if you have the gold to play the fortune teller all the way, you don't need the fortune teller to attain gold or materials. This is just a fun little game to pick up some extras along the way, 9 times out of 10.
If you are not willing to buy gold to play this fortune game, stick to stage 1. It is intentionally designed to give you high odds of winning to tempt you to go further. Don't be tempted.
If you are looking for a particular item, the deals are much better from packages or the trader.
Thank you Fabetkate Buffin for the graphical reward summary. If you know any of the missing rewards, please put it in the comments or send either of us a personal message.
Happy Farming. Smart
I lost 110000? by playing ten rounds. Was end of March well after Easter event. I also didn't receive any mallets. Was first and now last time I went past round 1. I didn't think they would make it possible to lose 9 rds in a row and I'm also amazed they think anyone would buy more gold after that. I surely won't. I had bought some every few weeks or so but not after that garbage.