Recently, LiveCasinos.com covered the topic of the emerging casino wheel game market. We looked at these specialized titles and discussed what makes them tick – specifically, what makes them fun. That’s all fine and dandy, but an important question remains in every true gambler’s mind. How to win Wheel of Fortune styled live casino games? Is there a viable strategy?

As one might expect, this depends on the game in question. Most of them are vastly different from each other. However, we can point to some general rules and guidelines for the best results.

How to Win Live Casino Wheel Games

If you’ve read the article we mentioned above, you’ll know that there’s no easy answer to this question. If you haven’t, we thoroughly recommend that you do, but we’ll run it down quickly anyway.

Essentially, all wheel-based casino games are specialty products, initially intended for niche audiences. Unlike most of the classics like live roulette or blackjack, most wheel games aren’t just versions of an older, established ruleset. There are inspirations, of course, but they are by and large completely unique concepts. (However, some are just carbon copies of older wheel-based games, but these are very rare examples. Also, the Wheel of Fortune game show is a noteworthy inspiration, prompting many fans to classify these games as Wheel of Fortune casino games.)

Of course, this article wouldn’t have a point unless we could help you anyway. For starters, there aren’t many live casino wheel games out there, so we can cover a good chunk of them. Secondly, if you play enough of them, you start to notice certain patterns. Basically, we can tell you what to pay attention to whenever you play Wheel of Fortune online.

Wheel-based Casino Games and Betting Value

Much like roulette, you have no direct control over the outcome of a wheel spin. This means you have to direct your attention to things that you do have control over. In this case, these are the bets. Which bets you make is pivotal to all wheel casino game strategies.

In a lot of cases, some bets are simply objectively better than others. This comes down to the concept of betting value. Essentially, what you’re looking at is the ratio of potential profits compared to the probability of success. Note that this has very little to do with how likely to win the bet actually is. Although most casino strategies claim that safer bets are generally better, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, a risky bet can be better, purely because its profits are big enough to warrant a high degree of risk.

Let’s compare this to roulette. In roulette, all available bets are an accurate representation of their likelihood of success, minus the house edge. For instance, Red/Black bets have just under 50% of success, and they double your money. If there was no zero and no house edge, that would be a perfectly balanced bet in terms of value– neither good nor bad.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that all casino games are technically “bad” in terms of value. That’s because each game has a house edge, which is just the nature of casino games. Remember – the house always wins.

Example of Betting Value in Wheel Casino Games

Let’s give you an example of how this works in a wheel-based live casino game. We will use Mega Wheel by Pragmatic Play, because it has an obvious instance of bad and good betting value (though “better” value is perhaps a more accurate term.)

Now, if you’ve read our review and Mega Wheel strategy guide, you’ll immediately know what we’re talking about. If you look through the bet table, you’ll notice that there are 9 options in total. The ones we’re interested in are numbers 8 and 10, and numbers 15 and 20.

Now, as with most such Wheel of Fortune casino games, the bet number is actually your payout. So the 8 bet pays out 8:1, and the 10 bet pays out 10:1.

However, if we take a look at the actual wheel, we’ll see both 8 and 10 appear 4 times on the wheel. This gives them a roughly 7.4% of success. However, both these bets have exactly the same probability of landing on each spin of the wheel – 7.4%.

However, they offer different payouts- 8:1 and 10:1. The latter offers better returns for exactly the same level of risk. As such, betting on 10 is always the better option between the two.

We can notice that the 15 and 20 bets have a similar situation. Both have a roughly 3.7% chance of success, while the 20 bet offers a better payout. As such, betting on 10 and 20 but never on 8 and 15 is the best Mega Wheel strategy.

Not all wheel games are this obvious. Often, different bets would have different probabilities of success, but some are just more worth the risk than others.

Special Bet Strategy

Things can get infinitely more complicated once you take into account some of the extra features some casino wheel games have. For example, let’s look at Adventures Beyond Wonderland by Playtech. This game has only 4 typical number bets. Now, some are better than others (The 2 and 10 bets are better than 1 and 5), but others are used for minigames and “Wonderspins.”

Because of how Wonderspins work in Adventures Beyond Wonderland, they don’t offer consistent returns. Instead, they take you to a different wheel with a lot more moving parts and multipliers. Calculating the RTP for these yourself would be a nightmare, let alone betting value. This game even has Mystery Spins and Magic Dice, complicating the matter even further.

Unfortunately, this means that the only way you can make a Playtech Adventures Beyond Wonderland strategy is by relying on the RTP values offered by the creators. This is true for most such titles, such as Crazy Time and Monopoly by Evolution. It’s as simple as just going for the highest RTP option and hoping to get some lucky multipliers.

Ultimately, these games are just not about profitability. Instead, you’re supposed to enjoy the ride and thrill of the mystery.