I suppose it's possible that the router hadn't managed to get an Internet connection when I tried to load the bitZino tab, and so it was unable to request the latest state.  I can't be sure.

It looks better in roulette now:

The problem here is that the main attraction of these games is how fast they work.  There's no blockchain timestamp until the transaction is in a block, which takes on average 10 minutes to happen.  You don't want to have to wait for 10 minutes on average each time you bet before you find out whether you won or not.

If you're worried about the operator cheating, don't play in the hour before midnight (server time).  This should remove the ambiguity.

I thought you hadn't understood the first time I told you, so I told you again with pictures to back me up... 


This reminds me of an almost-certainly-unrelated issue, in which I thought my balance was incorrectly reported.

Almost a week ago when I was playing around with the bug that caused the buttons to become active a second or so after they visually appear to be active, my balance had been around 1230000, and I worked it up to 1280000 or so, but after experimenting with placing 5 of 6 "sixline" bets and a few "red" bets, my balance was back at 1230000.  I thought I was carefully using martingale betting, which means my balance will only go up, until I lose it all.  I tried reloading, but I still had 1230k chips.

I'm not sure where the 5k chips went.  It's probably operator error on my part, and so I was thinking I'd like to be able to request a history of my bets.  Maybe a simple text file download of all the bets I made between 2 specified date/time points would suffice.  Then I'd be able to see what I did wrong, or maybe that there's a bug on your end.

Am I and all my friends still banned?  I forget exactly why I was banned.  Was it just because Josh thought my girlfriend was imaginary?

I noticed something else yesterday but didn't have a chance to report it until now.

2 days ago I was playing and know for sure that my last bet was on red for 4567 chips.  My balance before was 1230000 and after was 1234567.  Easy numbers to remember.

I finished playing, shut off the generator (we don't have electricity here except from a gasoline powered generator) which killed the Internet connection, then watched movies on the laptop until the laptop battery was dead.

The next morning I fired the laptop back up.  It was completely dead, not just hibernated or suspended.  After cold booting, I ran Chromium.  It told me I had a bunch of tabs open when it shut down and would I like to restore them.  I clicked 'restore'.  One of the tabs was bitZino.  I was online at the time, and here's how the restored bitZino tab looked:



Note the "bet per click" is as I left it, at 4567 chips (I edit the bet amount in that box because the text is bigger there), but the balance is neither 1230000 nor 1234567.  It's a smaller value, from some time before my final bet of the day before.  Note also my balance in the top right is zero, even though you had added 0.25 BTC to my account overnight.

I immediately realised it was wrong, and hit the 'refresh' button in the browser.  It updated as follows:



Notice the balance now shows the 0.25 BTC you gave me, and the in game balance is as I expected.  The 'bet per click' has been reset to 1 though.  It surprised me that the 'bet per click' could survive a cold boot without getting reset, but not a page refresh.

In summary, I was surprised to see the outdated numbers when I rebooted my laptop.

Here's what I'm seeing:  a 1200 bet on 3rd 12 reduces my max bet on 36:



But the same bet on 1st row doesn't:



Is that something you know about and intend to happen?  That's what seems odd to me.


Thanks.  And you're welcome.

I can think of 4 examples, all of which have worked for me:

* play on a poker site when you're good enough relative to the other players that you win enough to beat the rake.
* play on a site that offers enough bonuses and incentives to make it +EV to play there
* play on a site that allows you to count cards at blackjack.
* play on a site which allows you to place bets against other players, rather than against the house.  spot good value bets and profit from them.  sometimes it's possible to use multiple sites to create a no-lose situation.  For example I once bet on "Michael" to win some TV reality show on one site, and bet that he wouldn't win on another site.  The odds available on the two sites were out of whack with each other, meaning that whatever happened I made a profit.  When I phoned the betting company that I had won the bet against asking how  I could withdraw my winnings, they seemed to suggest that nobody had ever asked that before, and that I didn't need to - I could simply bet my winnings on another event instead!  This was before the days of Bitcoin.

All of the above can offer a +EV gambling experience.  Using "a good martingale strategy" never changes your expectation.  If the odds are in the house's favour then changing your bet size doesn't change that.  You'll still lose everything if you play long enough.  With a +EV game, that's not necessarily true; it's still possible to lose everything due to a run of bad luck, but your expectation is to grow your bankroll, not shrink it.

The doomswitch only gets turned on when you bet more than you want to lose in my experience.

Try betting for microbitcoins - you'll win lots then. 

Just kidding - it's all provably fair.  It's God who hates you.

I just noticed something else that I hadn't noticed before.

I only just started playing 'Sixline' bets.  I've been playing 5 of them at a time.

When I win, I want to quickly click 'Repeat last' then 'Spin' to play again.  I wait for the 'Repeat last' button to stop being grey, click it, but nothing happens.

It turns out that there's about a 1 second delay each time between the 'Repeat last' button changing from grey to white text and the button actually becoming clickable.  During that 1 second, the mouse cursor is an arrow when hovering over the button.  After the 1 second delay the mouse cursor changes to a hand with a pointy index finger, like it does on all other active buttons.

I didn't notice this delay when playing single red/black bets.  Although I just checked and it is happening there now as well, whether I win or lose the button goes white a short while before it goes active.  Maybe it's not a whole second, but it's long enough that I always seem to click before it's listening for clicks.

I'm pretty sure there's no winning strategy for BlackJack at bitZino.  It's a game of skill, but no matter how good you are at it, the house edge is still positive.

I was just trying a variation on martingale betting - betting the first 5 groups of 6 numbers, and multiplying the bet by 6 when I lose.  I had a run of three 31-36's in a row which caused my bet per group to go 100, 600, 3600, 21600.  One of the 21600's won, winning 129600.  The win was displayed in a tiny almost-impossible-to-read font size:



You probably don't want to make the text too big in the case that there are other winning bets nearby, but when only one bet wins maybe you can afford to make the text bigger?

Edit: I won a 7 figure sum, and it looks like it uses the same small font (yes, I'm now a millionaire in microbitcoins!):

My initial reaction is one of surprise.  I would *never* have guessed at the maximum bet formula you just described given the description.  There's literally no way the user could come up with the conceptt you just explained from the description you make available to him, especially not the wrinkle that outer wagers don't count at all towards the amounts wagered on numbers but every other bet does.

In particular the simple 2 line description of "max bets" leads me to believe that you have a simple way of determining the max bets, whereas in fact it's pretty complex.  Players probably never think of putting 1.8 BTC on a 1,2 Split as being the same as putting 0.9 on 1 and 0.9 on 2 although mathematically it is equivalent.  And even if they do, then I don't see why they wouldn't similarly think of putting 1.8 BTC on red as being the same as putting 0.1 on each red number...

It seems weird to me that betting on '1st row' (betting on the 12 multiples of 3) doesn't count as a bet on number 3, but betting on '1st 12' *does* count as a bet on number 3.  They're both 12-number bets.  I guess you're not counting '1st 12' as an outer wager, whereas '1st row' is an outer wager?

I would like to see a link ('details'?) in the 'max bets' info which pops up a description much like what you just posted, so I can know what's really going on.  I think changing the first line of the text to "max total bet per number" would go some way to helping the user guess at your formula - at least that clues her in that multiple bets are being added in some way for each number, but I still don't think it's clear enough without the extra link to the actual details.

Having the max bet show up in the popup when I'm making a bet goes some way to solving the problem, but doesn't help when the max bet is more than I currently have available to bet.  In that instance I just see my current balance, when I want to know what the maximum really is - so I can decide how much more I need to deposit.

Maybe all it needs is a 'rules' page which lists all these details for each of the games, so you can keep the uncluttered game interface, but still have these details available somewhere.

I just checked the 'max bets' in the top left corner of the roulette game.  It tells me the max bet per number, and the "max overall bet" which I presume is the most I can bet per spin in total.  But I don't see the max I can bet on any of the other bets.  What's the max I can bet on a 50/50 bet like red or even?  Are you counting that as a "number"?

I think most places will allow you to bet higher on the bets which have a lower return.  As I remember it, the world's #1 Bitcoin Casino (lol, jk) has a higher limit when you're betting on groups of 6 or more numbers than when you're betting on less than 6 (like 4, 3, 2, or a single number).

Either way, I think the "max bets" section should be made clearer.

You see, "Erowid is an online library containing tens of thousands of pages of information about psychoactive drugs, plants, and chemicals [...]".  And you made a bunch of typos.  And there's this ad campaign apparently that shows negative effects of drugs using the catchphrase "this is your brain on drugs".  But I never saw it.

A joke always gets funnier the more you have to explain it, right???