How Mines odds work
In Mines, a fixed number of mines is hidden at random on a grid. You reveal tiles one at a time; every safe tile raises the multiplier, and one mine ends the round. Because the mines do not move and are placed uniformly, the chance of surviving k picks depends only on three numbers: the board size, the number of mines and how many tiles you reveal.
On the default 5×5 board with 3 mines, the first pick is safe 88.00% of the time (22 of 25 tiles). After that, one safe tile and one tile are gone, so the second pick is safe 21 of 24 times — and so on. Multiply the fractions and you get the chance that all five picks are safe:
P(5 safe) = 22/25 × 21/24 × 20/23 × 19/22 × 18/21 = 49.57% The general formula is the hypergeometric probability C(safe, k) ÷ C(tiles, k), where C is "n choose k". Our calculator evaluates it with exact fractions, so the result is not affected by floating-point rounding.
Fair multiplier vs. what the game pays
A fair bet pays exactly the inverse of its probability: if something happens 49.57% of the time, a fair payout is 2.0175× your stake (including the stake). Real games subtract a house edge. With a 1% edge the game pays 1.9974× — and that 1% is taken from every multiplier on the board, no matter how many tiles you reveal.
Extreme settings
- 1 mine, 1 pick: 96.00% chance, pays 1.0313×. Almost always safe, almost nothing won.
- 5 mines, 5 picks: 29.18% chance (1 in 3.43), fair 3.4269×.
- 24 mines, 1 pick: 4.00% chance (1 in 25), fair 25.0000×.
Different settings trade a small, frequent win for a large, rare one. None of them changes the long-run return, which is fixed by the house edge.
Why Mines "strategies" don't work
Patterns, corners, "cold" tiles and predictor apps all rely on the idea that some tiles are safer than others. With uniform hidden placement they are not: every unrevealed tile has the same probability of hiding a mine. A provably fair game fixes the mine positions from a server seed before you click, and in our reference scheme you can check the placement afterwards with our provably fair verifier.
