Continuing on from our series on various types of machines that exist in different states, we’ve covered traditional Vegas-style slot machines, Bingo Machines, Historic Horse Racing machines and New York Lottery style machines.
Similar, albeit not identical, to New York lottery casinos is what can be found in Washington State. Here’s a question from a player:
What is the difference between TLS and RNG games. Here in Washington State, we use TLS which is the only state to do so. I was just wondering if TLS changes the frequency of hitting a jackpot compared to RNG-type games.
Kevin S.
TLS stands for Tribal Lottery System; similar to the New York Lottery system, the setup acts effectively like scratch cards – a set of outcomes are pregenerated. When you make a wager, one of the tickets are “bought” and the outcome of that ticket is displayed on the machine; the reels are, as they say, “for entertainment purposes only.”
While New York’s lottery system and Washington’s TLS setup have similar structures, even though they’re not identical, you’ll often see some of the same games available in both since they’re operating in similar environments – the outcome is coming from outside the machine and the machine is just rendering a reels combination that matches that outcome.
If you ever looked into lottery scratchers, you’ll see varying odds for varying top jackpots based on the prize structure of an individual game. So a TLS system will have different games with varying prize structures, just like scratch tickets, and for that matter slots payout structures.
The biggest hurdle is that there are less combinations of outcomes because of the limited number of tickets involved. Players who play pull tabs, for instance, will sometimes find identical tickets within the tub because only so many combinations have been generated to display the winning and losing outcomes.
This can lead to some unique scenarios that wouldn’t be nearly as likely with an RNG-based machine, such as identical line hits, as seen above. For more complicated games it can lead to identical bonuses too, as we’ve seen reported on games like Ultimate Fire Link in markets like these.
Whenever the outcome is coming from outside the machine, the number of results for a particular winning combination may be more limited. Even in markets with Bingo, it’s possible to get the same bonus if the same bingo combinations are landed in a single game.
So to answer your question, the odds can still be dynamic based on the number of total outcomes (tickets generated) and the odds of winning a jackpot within that. It won’t necessarily be any better or worse, and game makers will tend to put effort to make the odds similar if you saw a particular brand in a Vegas casino vs. a TLS casino.
So looking at things like the top prize and such can give you some clue to how tough a game will be overall, and that rule of thumb will hold true here as well.
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