Nine Rings

This minigame was part of the Dragon Festival.

Rules
Nine rings are organized in a 3 x 3 layout in which contestants may stand. Each round costs ten tickets. Every eight seconds, one ring is randomly chosen as the winner. Players standing in that ring are awarded 25 tickets if it is the center, 40 if it is on the side, or 55 if it is a corner. Standing in an adjacent ring to the winning ring awards fifteen tickets.

Teilah organizes games into groups of nineteen rounds. Each full cycle takes approximately three minutes to run with a momentary pause to attract new players between cycles.

Odds
This odds of this game will return 17 for every 18 tickets spent regardless of which circle you stand on. Standing a corner circle will increase the rate of losses for those hoping to achieve both the Lucky and Unlucky titles simultaneously, but standing in corner circles increases the chance of having to go buy more tickets earlier resulting from a bad string of luck. In this game, it does not matter where you stand if you want to get the Lucky title.

You gain on average 9.4 tickets per round no matter which circle you are on, and you always lose 10.

See also Rings of Fortune for a 4 x 4 variation.

Strategy
The average payout is independant of the ring you choose. On average, you will lose 0.55 tickets per round. The corner ones, however, make you lose more often. So if you are going for both the Lucky and Unlucky titles, stand in a corner. Unless you feel like wasting time, and wasting money, you probably do not want to be playing the game for extended periods of time unless you are going for the titles, since the odds are always against you.