Nine columns, five columns, and a clock
A lobby is a list of rooms that differ in four dimensions at once: how many numbers the pool holds, which patterns pay, how often a round starts, and how the prize is fixed. Reading a lobby is reading those four columns, and the room name - which is usually the most prominent thing on the tile - tells a reader almost none of them.
- Sheet
- BD-56-07
- Subject
- The room types
- Variants
- 90 / 75 / 80 / 30-ball
- Patterns
- line, two lines, full house
Variant: how the pool and the card differ
Ninety-ball
A pool of 90 numbers, a card of fifteen numbers in three rows and nine columns, and a full house at fifty calls. It is the variant most rooms in the United Kingdom and Ireland run, and the one whose card a reader is most likely to picture: three rows, nine columns, blanks in each row.
Seventy-five-ball
A pool of 75 numbers and a five-by-five pattern card, often with a free centre square. Lines are replaced by patterns - a row, a column, a diagonal, a shape - and the prizes are usually one pattern, then a second, then a coverall. It is the common variant in North America.
Eighty-ball
A pool of 80 numbers on a four-by-four grid with a free centre. The smaller grid makes lines fill faster, so a round is short and the pattern prizes are smaller and more frequent. It is the variant built around a quick round.
Thirty-ball
A pool of 30 numbers and a card of nine, with a round that can finish in nine calls. This is the speed room: fewer numbers, a shorter call, more rounds an hour, and therefore the highest hourly cost per ticket at the same ticket price - the hour page is where that shows up.
Pattern: which completions pay, and out of one pot
A round usually pays more than one prize. A line, two lines and a full house are the ordinary set, and each is a completion that stops that part of the game for the player who reaches it. The three prizes come out of the same money the round took, so they are not additions to each other: a room that advertises a large one-line prize has made its full house smaller, and the arithmetic belongs to the numbers page.
The pattern also sets the length of a round. A one-line completion arrives early - often inside fifteen calls - and a full house usually runs most of the way through the pool. A room playing for the full house only will run longer and show a bigger prize; a room paying a line at fifteen calls keeps players interested and pays a smaller figure for it.
Cadence: the column that decides the cost
Rooms are marketed on their prizes and priced by their cadence. A speed room running a round every ninety seconds offers more chances per hour and a smaller prize per round, and at a fixed ticket price it costs a player several times what a slower room costs. Two further room types exist to manage that clock:
- The gated free room. A room with no ticket price that is open only to players who have bought into the cash rooms within a stated period. It is a loyalty device rather than a free product, and the gate is the price. The loyalty desk in this series covers tier programmes of the same family.
- The jackpot room. A room with a reduced in-round prize whose takings contribute to a network jackpot, paid when a coverall is completed inside a stated number of calls. It is a different prize family wearing the same ticket - the jackpot page follows the money.
Reading a lobby in four columns
The practical version of this page is a table a reader can build from any lobby's own tiles, without trusting the copy on them.
- Variant. How many numbers are in the pool, and how many on a card. Ninety, seventy-five, eighty and thirty are the ordinary answers, and the pool size sets how long a round can run.
- Patterns and prizes. Which completions pay, and what each is worth in the room's own currency. Where a room states only the headline prize, the other two are the ones to find.
- Cadence. How long a round lasts and how long the gap between rounds is. The two together give the rounds per hour, which is the multiplier on the ticket price.
- Family. Whether the prize is a share of the tickets sold, a share with a guaranteed floor, or a fixed sum. That is the column that decides who carries a quiet night.
Why the room name is the least useful thing on the tile
Room names describe a mood rather than a product: evening, sunrise, lucky, gold, bingo blitz. None of them is a column, and the same name is used by different operators for rooms with different variants and different prize families. The four columns above are stated somewhere in the room, usually on a help or rules page one click from the tile - which is exactly the click this desk exists to recommend.