That's right, a big fat $0.25 prize per freeroll, now around-the-clock. New freerolls are announced as soon as the last one starts.

Right now it only takes four (4) players to start a sit & go freeroll. The more demand we have, the bigger the tables and the prizes will get. Come & get a game!

Eurozone, Asia and Latin America only. And yes, StrikeSapphire, Bitcoin 카지노는 한국에서 사용할 수 있습니다!

Cheers,
Josh

One hour left to get the bonus! And yes... StrikeSapphire is the only casino anywhere that lets you withdraw winnings from bonuses before the bonus itself is played through.

Hey all, just a little something special for the forum from the Bitcoin Casino with the mostest  

Deposit with Sapphire only between now (16/8/2011 16:33:00) and Midnight GMT, and use this code in the deposit window:

BitcoinForum3028k9

For a 50% Bonus on all Bitcoin deposits up to $50! This is our very first bonus offer, and all part of our grand experiment. Fine print: Max bonus amount is $25. One use per player, please. 30x WR applies to the bonus amount, see our Terms of Service for full details.

Just a side-note: Some joker has been going around trying to get our signup and customer support emails spamboxed on Gmail. We don't send spam, only account-related information. And the promotional stuff we send to players about once a week all has an "unsubscribe" link on it. Anyway, we're working to get out of the doghouse with Gmail, but in the meantime do us a favor and if you notice our email in your junk folder, please mark it "Not Spam". The more people who do this, the more difficult it'll be for this guy to do it!

Only at StrikeSapphire.com. Signups are free right now. It takes 6 to start a game, and the prize pool for every game is $6. Games last 15-30 minutes.

The game is simple. You get a random selection of countries interspersed with your opponents. Click one of your countries to select it, and then click a neighboring country to invade it with all but one of the chips in your territory. Each chip is "flipped" randomly against the opponent's chips. Ties favor the attacker. When you "Fortify" at the end of each round, you're awarded chips based on the largest number of contiguous territories you hold. The fortify chips are distributed randomly around your countries.

Right now, there's no charge to play and we're giving away money. Come and grab it!

*** Important edit! To get to our free ChipWars tournaments, click "Board" games on the Sapphire home page!***

ChipWars:

By popular request, we're having a $20 Freeroll, Sunday, 9pm GMT...

one table only, so get there early... signups start 6 hours before the tournament!

We've enabled chat in the poker lobby now, so you should be sure to find a game in the lead-up, and all ring poker games on Sapphire are still rake free until Monday!!!

See you at the tables.

Thanks for playing, and good luck next week!...there's lots more Bitcoin to give away man, we haven't scratched the surface of this thing. We got Bitcoin coming out of orifices we didn't know we had.

Seriously, on Defxor's and Rikurr's request, we're going off the map to start a freeroll this Sunday, one table, $20. It starts at 9pm GMT. Might turn this into a weekly thing if we get a good turnout... so turn out, people! Sapphire's a good joint to get to know everybody, it's about karma, it's a grand experiment, and we don't really give a flying fuck if we make money. We're all paying it forward, and ain't poker the best way to make frenemies? Hell yeah! Come and party with us, you won't be sorry.

- Striker *oh yeah. And if you read this far, just because I'm more or less wasted after watching 9 freerolls tonight, I'm doing something cool. I just made all our live NL Hold'em tables rake free from now through Sunday. Beat that, if you can!  

Hey!! The server is back up. We switched databases this week, and it turned out there was a liiiiittle bug that pretty much completely destroyed the point of playing poker... ask one of the guys who was in the first tournament  

Anyway, turns out it was just something buggy with the database. We're back online and starting tournaments at 7pm GMT. We're going to run freerolls at 7:30 and 8:30 also to make up for lost time!

*edit (times were initially given in Central European)

Don't forget! Tonight's our second set of freerolls.

* $10 NL Hold'em Freerolls, every hour on the hour, from 5pm-Midnight GMT.

* All $0.10/0.20 ring games are rake free.

Freerolls only take 4 players to start. Take some time out from trading BTC and gamble on a sure thing  

Thanks!!!!!

We're having another set of seven, $10 Freerolls this Wednesday, 5pm-Midnight GMT, for everybody who couldn't make it last week. Plus no-rake $0.10/0.20 games that night. Djao, you get a fresh start. Coins for all 

Thanks for your concern.

We don't plan to denominate in Bitcoin, because we have other payment options in the works. We actually are a normal "fiat-currency casino" and software company, incorporated in Costa Rica. We just happen to be one that accepts Bitcoin. What works for you guys as a US-based "play money" site denominated in BTC just doesn't work for us, because ultimately people will be able to withdraw USD from us using other methods as well. We have a different legal and business model with a lot more overhead. Our customers withdraw expecting Dollar value the way it's shown on our site, regardless of Bitcoin price, and we manage the conversion at our own risk and expense. This way players know that on Sapphire, $5 Blackjack is always $5 Blackjack, whether you deposit with Bitcoin, Moneybookers or Visa. It's actually by increasing the mobility of the currency this way that we believe our site can make the best contribution to Bitcoin in general.

The reason for batching large orders is obviously to avoid having to execute a trade for every single withdrawal. It makes our accounting much clearer to have a daily settlement to Bitcoin, leaving enough petty cash in BTC for withdrawals under $50. This is perfectly reasonable; any large online casino that starts taking BTC is going to have to do the same thing. Our experience to date helps explain why you don't see companies like Bodog or Sportsbook.com making plans to accept Bitcoin (though they're following all of this). And as BTC has been dropping, batching the orders helps mitigate the "slippage" every time we have to move funds from trading houses to players... literally, the risk of Bitcoin losing a significant chunk of value in the 30 minutes or so it takes to move those funds across, forcing us to make up the difference. This isn't a normal currency exchange we're dealing with.

Of course, we'll start holding more BTC in the till as soon as we think it's safe to do so. For now, while we realize that any delay seems long in the Bitcoin world, a same-day payout guarantee is blazing fast for online casinos dealing in USD, and we think players will appreciate that we're holding their Dollar amounts in actual USD while Bitcoin is being manipulated all over the place. People play at Sapphire because it's unique, the games are original, the atmosphere is fun, and they know what they're getting. This way, they're welcome to leave their cash on our site to ride out the Bitcoin storm, and we don't have to worry about taking a loss on dead money lying around. Formalizing our policy on batch transactions just makes us a safer place to play.

We just sent this to our players, and I thought we should publish it on the forum as well. The salient points are that we have maintained roughly equal USD value on our float despite the crisis, and we're making sure we keep doing that. Underlying this announcement is the fact that a large portion of our profit to date was in fact wiped out by the BTC decline, because we were waiting to pull it out pending dwolla / trading house issues. We launched believing Bitcoin had stabilized and we didn't need to go the extra two steps daily to USD and back to backup funds. It was a mistake, but all it really cost us was time and energy. We're still maintaining 3x total player deposits on tap at various trading sites for daily withdrawal, plus 25x total player deposits in bank reserves for jackpots. But now we're maintaining almost all of them other than petty cash in USD.

We're bullish on the long-term future of BTC, and we continue to view it as a viable payment method for gaming. We're also a USD-denominated casino, in a business with a lot of volatility ourselves, and our primary concern is to keep our players happy. If that means we have to deal with BTC as a currency solely for trade, then so be it.

No payouts have been late, and our initial float currently sits at the level it was when we launched, thanks to our orderly transition. It's just going to take a little longer to access it, because we're not leaving it in BTC overnight anymore.

This extra step makes us more secure, and your money more secure with StrikeSapphire. We hope to get back to instant payouts soon. We're putting this out in the interest of full disclosure: Most casinos take days or weeks to process withdrawals, and to this point we've never taken more than six hours. But we put long-term honesty and due diligence first; and keeping 3x player deposits in Bitcoin rather than USD at this point would be crazy. Hopefully this will be a satisfactory solution for everybody.

----------------------------

Dear players.

Due to recent extreme volatility in the Bitcoin markets, Sapphire shifted the majority of our Bitcoin reserve to USD early on to protect our players' funds.

This incurs additional time trading back to Bitcoin to process withdrawals.

Until Bitcoin stabilizes, BTC withdrawals of over US $50 will be batch-processed daily at 3pm GMT. Lesser withdrawals will be processed as quickly as possible, usually within 1-6 hours.

All withdrawals will be converted to Bitcoin at the TradeHill.com ask rate at the time we process them. This allows you to get your USD-equivalent winnings back whole at the time we send the funds without causing us to absorb massive currency risk.

Sapphire has ridden out the current storm through prudent monetary management, and has taken the necessary steps to protect your money and our jackpot payouts as well.

Thanks for playing, and as always, if you have any questions feel free to contact us!

Josh Strike
Founder/CEO
StrikeSapphire.com

Not at all! I'm glad you asked.

Firstly, the rates for deposit and withdrawal are both locked in when you successfully submit a request. So even though we took a few hours to process it, we did actually do it at the rate our servers got from Tradehill when you made the request, which it looks like was $10.88 at 8:29am GMT. Now -- we do use the Tradehill "ask" rate for deposits and the "bid" rate for withdrawals...so it could be you noticed the "ask" rate in the deposit window (it changes when you change the menu to withdraw)...and it could be it was just a wide spread at the time. Also, the deposit/withdrawal doesn't update the rate live, it only gets it once from Tradehill when the window is opened. When we actually processed the morning withdrawals, the live rate was about $10.80, so we did save a little BTC over if you had withdrawn later in the day. If something other than what I'm describing actually happened, let me know...but when we process withdrawals, our servers don't check the rate again, so I'm pretty sure this is how it went down.

Which leads to your other question, about letting people play in Bitcoins. There's been a lot of interest in this from the BTC community. But the truth is, we're planning on branching out to other payment methods in coming months, and also trying to attract players who view Bitcoin as a short-term, in and out payment method, and aren't necessarily looking to keep their money in BTC. It would be a massive operation to try and convert the site's internal currency now that we're running, and we're not sure it makes sense for us. Initially we were thinking about spinning off a whole separate site that would only run in BTC, but it was too much operational overhead, and we didn't want to split the small crowd we were expecting in BTC from the 100-ish beta testers we already had on-site.

To your question about players using us as a de-facto bank or bond, it's a very good point, and there's been some talk about that among us recently since last week's earnings were basically wiped out over the last 2 days by the BTC drop. We're bullish on BTC, but being dollar-denominated, we move most of our cash to USD so that we aren't exposed to excessive currency risk. (Normal fluctuations in gambling revenue are bad enough ). We've had one guy just stick a bunch of bitcoins on the site and never play, which we're somewhat suspicious about, and we're considering a revision to the TOS that would basically tell people who do things like that, their money will be placed on reserve and may take a few days to withdraw because we're going to consider it out of play, discard it from our float amount and move it into a dollar-denominated account.

Right now, we maintain only between 2-3x total player holdings in BTC at any given time for immediate large paybacks. Behind that we have a buffer in USD on Tradehill, and behind that the other 90% or so of the casino's float is in banks, on PayPal, and in a forex basket of Euros and CHF. We've tried to spread the currency risk out so that no one calamity will bring us down.

Hope this answers some questions. We're still getting our feet and trying to deal with everything at once, so answering things like this actually helps me get a handle, in my own mind, on what our policies will be and how we'll respond to all kinds of things we haven't encountered before.

Every spin, deal, etc. on Sapphire comes from a constantly running random number generator and has no relationship with who's playing, how much they bet, or any other game data. Card shoes are published the following day; if we did anything like what you're talking about, those shoes wouldn't come out with an even or random distribution of cards. The data is available to all at https://strikesapphire.com/reports/ and you'll be able to find your blackjack shoes in there.

I'm always a little stunned when I hear this kind of question, it's par for the course I guess. Let me lay it out:

We don't believe in cheating or screwing anybody. This is our reputation on the line here, and pulling that kind of crap on our players would just be stupid. Players come to gamble and be entertained, and on the whole players lose over time. We're in for the long haul. I spent 3+ years building this software, not just to run a small BTC casino but to license it out and make 1000x what it's making right now.

But you have to know, we're in business to make money. We just do it the old fashioned way. By having the odds in our favor

Someone wins, someone loses, we get our percentage. It's a mathematical certainty. People who don't believe in individual luck assume something's rigged when they lose, or it's planning to scam them when they win. But luck exists. It runs in streaks. I see it constantly. And by "luck" I mean, in the course of a day, random blind chance will put together streaks of winnings for some and streaks of losses for others, and sometimes you just watch a guy and you see it's hot for him, and other times you see it's cold. Sometimes the whole casino gets hot or cold.

So, no guarantees your luck will hold, but you've done pretty well so far. Advice from this casino owner? The most important thing is having a good time, so enjoy it. Don't play anything you can't comfortably afford to lose, and always quit while you're ahead (easier said than done). Just remember, like they say, Vegas ain't Vegas because gamblers usually win.

Hey, this just made my day! As it happens, we processed this morning's withdrawals about an hour ago. Congratulations on the win, and thanks for the stellar review!!!

Someone's unwinding a massive position. Could as well be one of the thieves as Satoshi himself.

WE, at the moment, are trying very hard to be the reason to buy BTC -- basically as a transaction-cost-free way to play online games. The more legitimate casinos like us that start accepting Bitcoin, the stronger the currency will be, because the market for moving money on- and offline for gaming is thousands of times larger than the current pool of Bitcoin users. All this requires a (more) stable exchange rate, and established, not fly-by-night trading houses; because even if you can by porn, gambling and drugs with BTC, it's still not going to be accepted at Walmart next week (except in the used hooker pavilion, behind aisle six).

Ease of trade in and out is part of what's dragging this down right now, but the bigger part is that someone with a vast quantity of this shit is unwinding it in a meticulously planned fashion and taking everyone's money here. Including ours.

SO...COME SUPPORT YOUR LEGITIMATE BTC BUSINESS. We've been running $10 freerolls on the hour for the last six hours and ONLY FIVE PEOPLE HAVE SHOWN UP FOR FREE COINS. We have one more tonight, at Midnight GMT, and that's it. I can't tell you how seriously dismayed the players are that no one even wants free BTC right now, and so few people have shown up to play. Bit bummed about it myself. So stop gambling on f*cking mtgox and come play poker on our website while we're giving away free money dammit!

The only problem is that if the code is client-side, then it's vulnerable to hacking... and if it's server-side, then it's vulnerable to tampering, and it's using a huge amount of GPU or CPU power (and time) to perform a very simple task. Both parties have to trust each other. And if you trust each other -- an MD5 hash uses about 0.000001% the resources as a collision-detecting 3d wheel. Our wheel is truly collision-detecting and runs an algorithm on the ball that decelerates it to land in whatever slot the server tells it to. It detects collisions and tweaks the ball's velocity at every collision to look mostly right. So...anything can be tampered with.

Really, you have to trust the casino, and the casino has to trust you. Otherwise, don't bet with them. It always surprises me when I hear players in the US for example talk about sites they can still play at as if that's a good thing. If you find a site from the US that lets you gamble online, you're basically dealing with people who have no problem committing a Federal offense. Why would you think they'd have a problem cheating you, if there was money riding on it? Their reputation? Sense of honor? Moral principles? Anyway...

[plug] Freerolls are on right now... bitcoins are up for grabs 'til Midnight GMT!!! Get up in the Sapphire [/plug]

FREEROLLS ARE UNDERWAY! Come & join up!!!! (Last bump, really  )

Quick (shameless) bump... 5pm GMT tomorrow (Wednesday) the Freerolls start!

Aha. Yeah, we've never heard of that bug before in Roulette and spent awhile trying to reproduce it, but weren't successful.

The roulette wheel takes advantage of GPU acceleration if you're using Flash v. 10.1 or later. The ball is rendered in CPU space. If your video card was too busy mining to render the wheel video at variable frame speeds, it would probably look just like what you described. We don't have a testing environment where our CPU is empty and our video card is running at 200%, which is probably why we could find it =)

One solution to mine and play our Roulette at the same time would be to downgrade to Flash Player 10.0 (we're no longer compatible with 9.x). The wheel might be a little choppy, but it's not too bad on a Dual Core or better if it isn't sitting with lots of other tables and/or other Flash tabs in the browser.

Geek-trader: Thank you, and all like you, for having the decency, courtesy and chivalry to respect our wishes and terms of service. No one wants to have their cash withheld while we figure out where they're from, anyway, right?

People in the US: This is good advice. Play at btcsportsbetting.com. They seem to be a good site. And we've heard their roulette works better than ours.