Texas Tea is IGT’s classic slot machine about Texas Ted, a cartoon oil tycoon, from around 1999 to 2000 on Game King hardware and online since about 2009. It is a plain 5×3, 9-line game with no wilds and no free spins: the extras are the Oil Dividend bonus, where Ted writes a cheque, and Big Oil, where you place derricks on a map of Texas. Returns vary widely by setting. The free demo below is a similar pokie.
Texas Tea runs on five reels and three rows with nine lines that pay left to right from the first reel. The lines are fixed in most descriptions, though one free-play version lets you choose 1, 3, 5 or 9. Stakes are set by the casino: the widest published range is 9 cents to $270 a spin, and other operators cap it far lower. IGT’s own RTP could not be found, and published figures range from 87.5% to 97.35% depending on the setting: 97.35% and 96.2% are quoted most often, and one database adds 92.5% as its default. Volatility is low in almost every source, with one calling it medium. Five Texas Tea logos pay the top prize of 10,000 times the line bet, which is 1,111.11x the total bet on nine lines, or $300,000 at the $270 maximum.
Texas Tea Pokies Characteristics
Wins pay left to right from the first reel, and only the logo pays for a single symbol: one in the leftmost column returns 2x the line bet. There is no wild, so every line win needs the symbols themselves. Texas Ted is the scatter and counts anywhere; three or more start the Oil Dividend Bonus. The oil derrick is stricter: three, four or five must land on adjacent reels from reel 1 along a payline to open Big Oil.
There are no free spins and no progressive jackpot, and no rule description mentions a gamble, a bonus buy or reel multipliers; the free-spin and wild tags some databases show are not backed by the detailed rules. It is a typical early-2000s IGT video slot: a plain base game and two second-screen bonuses that pay a lump sum.
Wins below are multiples of the line bet, the same as coins per line, for a line starting on the first reel.
Ted’s only prize is the Oil Dividend award, and no line pay is listed for the derricks. Five logos pay 1,111.11x the total bet on nine lines, twenty times what five armadillos pay, while a single logo returns less than a quarter of a nine-line stake. Divide any figure by nine for multiples of the total bet.
Three or more Texas Ted symbols anywhere start the Oil Dividend Bonus. Ted writes a dividend cheque that floats out to the player with a credit award on it, a random multiple of the total bet. The published rule summaries agree on the amounts: three Teds pay 3x, 8x, 15x or 25x, four pay 8x, 10x, 25x, 40x or 50x, and five pay 20x, 30x, 50x, 75x or 100x.
Three Teds can return as little as 3x the stake and five cap out at 100x, so the bonus tops up the balance; the big money sits on the logo line.
Three, four or five oil derricks on adjacent reels from reel 1, along a payline, open the Big Oil Bonus: the screen shakes, oil oozes across it, and a map of Texas divided into eight regions appears. You get one derrick per triggering symbol and place each in a different region; every derrick then pumps oil, and more oil means more credits.
How the award is worked out is where the sources split. The more detailed description has the pumps building a multiplier over several rounds, paid on the line bet, with a ceiling that rises with a fourth and fifth derrick. A slot database lists the same ceilings per derrick, which would make the top prize much larger. With no IGT rules found to settle it, no maximum is given here; both readings agree that every extra derrick lifts the ceiling.
At 97.35% the game keeps about 2.65 cents of every dollar bet over the long run; at 96.2%, 3.8 cents; at 92.5%, 7.5 cents; at 87.5%, 12.5 cents, nearly five times the top setting’s cost for the same game. With no IGT figure published, the help screen is the only place to see which one you are on. Low volatility means the balance moves in small steps: line wins are modest, the Oil Dividend pays 3x to 100x the stake, and five logos, the one result that changes a session, are too rare to plan around.
At 10 cents a line, a spin costs 90 cents and $90 covers 100 spins. Over a run that short the setting decides little: the expected cost is about $2.40 at 97.35% and $11.25 at 87.5%, while a top five-Ted cheque would pay $90 and five logos $1,000. Over 1,000 spins, $900 goes through the game and the expected cost grows to about $24 at the top setting and $113 at the bottom. Where lines can be chosen, keep all nine, because the derricks only count along a payline.
The online Texas Tea is the same 5×3, 9-line game with both bonuses; the 1 January 2005 date some databases show looks like a placeholder. Texas Tea Strike It Rich is a bingo-based Class II machine that keeps Big Oil, now with a ten-region map, and adds a Strike It Rich bonus: three or more of its symbols lead to a 3x3x1 matrix with free spins and coin values. It has a 50-credit cost to cover, and IGT’s description mentions multiple jackpots without naming them.
Texas Tea Pinball, shown at G2E in 2015 and first placed in Chile in January 2018, is a skill-based game: a video-reel base game, then a choice of a free-games bonus or a pinball bonus, on a concept licensed from Norris Pinball. IGT Slots: Texas Tea, released by Masque Publishing for PC and Mac in 2009, is a play-money simulation, not a gambling product.
The name is slang for oil, and the game turns it into a cartoon oil boom run by Texas Ted, a moustached tycoon who smokes a cigar while writing dividend cheques; the cigar earned the PC version a tobacco descriptor on its age rating. The symbols are Ted’s armadillo, a longhorn bull, his corporate jet and a Longhorn Cadillac, with Texas flowers and a barrel cactus below them. The land-based original had an orchestral score, and the online version is HTML5, so it runs on desktop, iOS and Android.
Texas Tea slots could not be confirmed on Australian club, pub or casino floors. IGT opened an Australian office to target the club market after it went public, but a search of ACT approval notices and a wider search of NSW, Queensland and Victorian approvals found no Texas Tea entry; that is not proof it was never here. For real money play online, IGT’s presence is described as the US, Canada and Europe, and none of the offshore casinos that accept Australians could be confirmed to carry it, so availability varies and the lobby search is the way to check. No official IGT demo was found; the free-play versions of the Texas Tea slot game in circulation are hosted by slot review sites.
Texas Tea suits players who like old-school IGT design: nine lines, low volatility, no wilds to track, two bonuses that pay a lump sum and a 10,000x line-bet top prize. It does not suit anyone who wants free spins, multipliers, a bonus buy or big swings. The one thing to check is the RTP in the help screen, because the same reels are published at anywhere from 87.5% to 97.35%, and at the bottom of that range it is an expensive way to play a simple game.
Published figures range from 87.5% to 97.35% depending on the setting, with 97.35% and 96.2% quoted most often. Check the casino’s help screen; IGT’s own figure was not found.
Land three, four or five oil derricks on adjacent reels from reel 1 along a payline. You then place one derrick per triggering symbol on an eight-region map of Texas.
Five Texas Tea logos on a line pay 10,000x the line bet, or 1,111.11x the total bet on nine lines. There is no progressive jackpot, and no record wins were found.
No. Its features are the Oil Dividend scatter bonus and the Big Oil map bonus; free games appear only in the Strike It Rich and Pinball versions.
It could not be confirmed in Australian venues or in offshore lobbies that accept Australians, so use the lobby search. No official IGT demo was found.
No direct sequel was found. IGT’s follow-ups are the land-based Texas Tea Strike It Rich, a Class II game with a ten-region Big Oil map, and the skill-based Texas Tea Pinball.
