The Wizard of Oz Over the Rainbow

Similar Games:

Volcanic Sevens Sure Fire Progressives and Money Hits Sure Fire Progressives

Risk Scale:

Orange (depends on what number you get it at; you might need 50x the bet or up to 375x)

Minimum Play:

If the balloon is $80 or higher on the 1-cent denom, play until it’s awarded. So for 2 cents or 5 cents, play any $160 or higher. For 10 cents, $320 or higher. Important: For whatever denom you’re playing, make sure you’re min betting.

Other:

This is a must-hit and although I included only one “similar game,” tons of must-hit slots are around many casinos. I didn’t include them here, because the problem is they’re often $1,000 or $5,000 must-hits and they’re never anywhere close to being +EV.

I’m not including probably over 50 different must-hit slots. There are so many rare ones that you’ll see maybe once in your life with the numbers usually nowhere close that it’s a waste of space to list each one here.

But the Wizard of Oz Over the Rainbow is ubiquitous enough to warrant inclusion. Here’s what the slot looks like:

See that hot air balloon? Each denom (1, 2, 5, and 10 cent) has a must-hit point. For 1 cent, it’s $100. That means the balloon can’t exceed $100. For 2 and 5 cents, it’s $200. For 10 cents, it’s $400.

I’ll make this simple: If the balloon is $80 or higher on 1 cent, play until it’s awarded. For 2 cents or 5 cents, play any $160 or higher. For 10 cents, $320 or higher. Important: For whatever denom you’re playing — and you’ll mostly find plays on 1 cent — make sure you’re min betting.

Why? The value of the balloon doesn’t change if you’re betting more on a denom, so there’s no sense in decreasing your advantage and betting more than you have to. Sure, a bigger bet pays you more if you do well in the base game, but by that logic, you could play any game in the casino on max bet.

Some grinders play anything $78 or higher on 1 cent, so the plays look like this: $78/$156/$156/$312. That’s fine too; it’s just a tad looser than I normally am if I don’t care about comps.

As I wrote in the risk section, it depends on what number you find this game at. Suppose the balloon is $80 on a 1-cent denom. I want about $300 on me just in case it doesn’t hit until the very top and I don’t hit anything of value along the way. That might not sound like a ton of money, but that’s 375x the bet. So whatever you’re betting, bring 375x the bet for this game, assuming you’re finding it in that $80 range.

This game has a couple of fun bonuses in addition to the hot-air balloon you’re chasing. The balloon, to be clear, can be hit on any bet and doesn’t need to reach the very top to be awarded.

First, like with the Follow the Yellow Brick Road slot above, Glinda can come out and do basically the same thing: add at least two wild reels, increase the size of the reels, and occasionally add multipliers.

The other bonus has a bunch of different variations, so I won’t go over all of them, but landing three or more special symbols (Oz, Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, Wicked Witch of the West, etc.) gives you eight free spins with different special features, depending on which characters you land. You can also hit the balloon during this bonus.

Here’s my video for Wizard of Oz Over the Rainbow: