297 is the number of seats.  The number registered is less than half that at the moment I think.

Of the >2000 accounts that qualify for a seat, many are idle and forgotten.

It's quite likely that the game will kick off with less than 200 people playing.

Note also that there is a 0.5 BTC bounty on both my head and Deb's, making the total prize pool effectively 3 BTC.

Doesn't that make the value of a ticket around 0.015 BTC?

$1.98, not $1.99.  $1.98 is 99% of $2.

If you got $1.99 back, that would be a 0.5% house edge.

Consider two bets, where you win one and lose one.

In total you risk $2 and end up with $1.99

You have lost 0.5% of everything you risked.

That's a 0.5% edge.

I had a dream last night that nakowa called me on the phone (I don't have a phone) and asked if I could meet him in Paris to show him how to pin his Internet Explorer toolbar to the edge of the screen on his tablet.

WTF?

Today's story comes from Doge-Dice.com, the retarded sister of Just-Dice.com where a lucky Martingale player managed to take over 40 million DOGE from the site.

[ Edit: this thread should be a general repository for Martingale stories from all over the place, not just JD and DD ]

This guy was playing at 49.5% with a 2x payout, but multiplying his stake by a factor of 3 each time he lost.  That's pretty risky.

Here's his profit chart:



Here's the tail end of his list of bets:


And here are the gains and losses laid out with one win per line:


Notice how after he hit a bad losing run ("-100k -300k -900k -2.7M -8.3M", 6 lines from the end) he broke with the pattern completely and just started making huge bets to recover.

I don't understand how you can look at that chart, see those numbers, and come to the conclusion that "He was only going to win a few 0.005 bets in the best case scenario".

Look at the chart.  He ended up more than 30 BTC higher than where he started.  That isn't "a few 0.005 bets".

And look at the numbers:


That sequence alone netted him a profit of 30.76 BTC.

Martingale's dumb, but not *that* dumb...

It's a losing strategy, just like any other strategy which involves modulating your stake in a -EV game.

But "con" is a bit strong.  There's no deception here, unless someone is selling it as a winning system.


I'm posting graphs to demonstrate what actually happens when people play Martingale.  So far I've posted 3 of them: two winners and a loser.  I don't mean to suggest that 66.666% of the time you will win.  This is purely anecdotal evidence.  It just so happens that since I've been watching out for and posting notable Martingale stories, two have resulted in the players winning and only one has resulted in a loss.

The way Martingale generally works is that mostly people win using it, but the occasional bust more than covers all the wins.

Notice the y axis on the site profit charts - the site is *up* by 18 thousand BTC.  That should be enough to suggest that the house is winning and the players are losing over all.

tl;dr: Martingale is a losing strategy on average, but the variance is huge

I think they like you to think that you have discovered a secret and forbidden way of winning.

But in reality they love Martingale players.  They keep the spread between min and max bets tight enough that you can't survive a very long losing streak.  Most Martingale players who limit their play will win a little, but a few will bust and lose more than enough to make up for the majority who win a little.

You have it exactly backwards.  At JD you can absolutely verify every roll, and in live casinos you can't.  Maybe the blackjack table has a few aces missing from the shoe.  You would never know.  Maybe the roulette wheel isn't properly balanced.  Etc.  At JD you can check that every roll is 100% fair.


You probably play more online than in live casinos because it's faster.  Maybe you were especially unlucky.  But don't go throwing around accusations of cheating when it can be proven mathematically that JD doesn't cheat.  Just because you can't be bothered to understand how JD is provably fair doesn't tell us anything other than exactly that.

Yes, it was lucky, but it was his 37th attempt to win at 9%.

That wasn't his last BTC - he ran out of coins in his balance on the 36th bet, then redeposited to make the 37th bet.  His deposit was enough to make quite a few more attempts, not just one.  Note that even with infinite resources he didn't have far to go before running up against the maximum profit per bet limit of around 255 BTC.

Yes, lots of people made lots of money buying Bitcoin early on.

I found Bitcoin in January 2011 and bought 40 BTC for $0.37 each, paying a total of $15.15 I think.

At the time it was really unclear that they would ever be worth anything, so it was hard to justify spending any significant amount of money on them.

As soon as June 2011 the price peaked at over $30 each before falling back to around $2 by the autumn.  I expect a lot of those who bought very cheaply in 2009 would have been unable to resist selling at some point in 2011.

And now we're sitting between $500 and $600.  Will we be kicking ourselves that we didn't sell before the price dropped to $2 again?  Or because we did sell and the price climbed to $10k?  I don't know...

I wish the "trust" system had more dimensions.

I can't justify marking you down as untrustworthy.

They should add the ability to rate for intelligence.

Here's how it works:

As long as new deposits keep coming in, they are used to pay out profits on old deposits.  The operator takes a cut of each payment too.

At some point new deposits aren't enough to fund the required payouts (because of inconvenient facts like there aren't infinite numbers of stupid people, or infinite numbers of Bitcoin in the world) at which point the operator makes a new forum account, and a new forum thread.

The early depositors double their money, encouraging them to play again
The operator takes a percentage of every deposit, encouraging him to run another Ponzi
The late depositors lose their money, encouraging them to get in early on the next one

Why wouldn't you continue doing this indefinitely?

While it's true that it's currently at 0.5%, what you wrote could be understood as meaning that it changed today.

The maximum profit per roll has only changed twice, as follows:

2013-06-20 started at 1%
2013-09-25 10:34:16 changed to 0.25%
2013-09-28 00:00:05 changed to 0.5%


Some reasons I can think of:

Gamblers are superstitious. If you stay on an account too long, maybe you wear out its luck. Maybe you don't quite trust the site operator, and think he could be turning on the imaginary doomswitch on your old account, so you make a new one. Maybe you have built up a reputation as a whale who never loses, so you make a new account each time you play, and if you lose you pretend it wasn't you.  If you win you can shout "yes! I won again!" - but if you use the same account all the time the site owner will easily be able to make a chart of your wins *and* losses and people will see that sometimes you lose.


Borrowing money to gamble with, even when you're gambling with a positive expectation, seems dangerous.  The people lending coins to Just-Dice are fully aware that they might not get as much back as they lend, and are happy with that deal.

I have played in the past, but went to great lengths to prove that I wasn't cheating.

If I want to play I need to:

1) outline exactly how I'm going to bet
2) publish my server seed hash
3) obtain my client seed from multiple people in the chat
4) enter that client seed
5) bet as described in step 1
6) hit 'randomize' to publish the server seed, and let everyone verify the rolls

That's a pain to do, and it keeps me from playing for the most part.

Here's a log I posted of when I did do exactly those steps:

http://www.reddit.com/r/justdice/comments/1vbo1p/justdice_owner_plays_his_own_game_and_wins/


That's more because he's a tightass than because he couldn't afford to lose it.

For the third day in a row there has been another crazy Martingale sequence on Just-Dice.  Today's was looking like a textbook "no, it doesn't work" story:



Here's the bet list:


but then, 32 hours after his long losing sequence he came back and made one last bet in the sequence:


And then his chart looked like this:



Does martingale really works?

It appears that yes, sometimes it really does if you have balls of steel...

Here's how noway's win fits in with the rest of the week's gains and losses at JD:



Here are his bets broken up into Martingale progressions:

I have trouble with the crazy big numbers that result from using paper as money.  Let's divide everything by 200k.  So:

Kahiwagi was to bet no more than 1 unit per hand in baccarat. The game would end when Akio either lost back his 30 units or he was ahead 60 units. The house edge in baccarat when you play the 'player' is 1.365%.


Because it's hypothetical?  Or are you accidentally spelling 'nakowa' wrongly?  Also, he's not "mine", he's his own.  Or maybe he belongs to the Chinese government.  I'm not sure how things work over there.


Again, let's divide throughout.  This time by 250 BTC:

So JD makes an offer to Tawaka that he bet no more than 1 unit each bet, and the match would end when Tawaka doubles to 80 units, or until he loses back the original 40 units.


1) I'll try to work that out.  it would be easy to arrive at an approximate answer by simulation.  To clarify, is the "player bet" even money?  ie. you double your stake when you win it?
2) You didn't state the chance he's playing at.  I think it matters.  nakowa always played at 49.5%, 2x so I guess we assume that's how he plays, but:
2a) How does the chance of winning each bet affect Takawa's chances against the house?
3) I expect it is a +EV move, but whether it is "smart" depends on dooglus' risk aversion.  If you have 10k BTC is it "smart" to risk it all on a coin flip that triples it if you win?  You have a 50% chance of making 20k profit, and a 50% chance of going bust.  It's +EV but I don't want a 50% chance of going bust.  I'll stick with the 10k, thanks.  It depends on the price of the booze I'm sending him, too.

Still posting on this old thread?  Everyone has moved to this new Ponzi now.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=649729

That one will never fail!   

The person placing the bets can simply agree to only place N bets per week, and never 'randomize' the seeds.  Then each week he publishes his N betids, and all participants can look up the rolls on the site and see that the seed hash is the same as it should be, and that the 'nonce' values are consecutive.

If there are any gaps in the nonce sequence then he's probably hiding a big win from you.

You again?

I guess as long as people are dumb enough to keep giving you their money you'll keep taking it off their hands.

See this thread for how this played out last time.

"check the blockchain ... it's working ..." then it stopped leaving people with big losses.