bitZino - Bitcoin Casino - Blackjack, Roulette, 3 Card Poker, Slots and more!

[libertaad]

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...

The intention here is to give the user an accurate summary of the maximum bet, without overwhelming them with all the details of the complicated formula. I agree though, that a link out to a full description is actually pretty important for discerning players.

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?

This is not actually the case. The "Outer Wagers" includes both the row bets and the [1st|2nd|3rd] 12 bets.

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.

Yeah, it's high time that we made a rules page for all of our games, and this would be the perfect spot to put a full description of this formula.

I also do like your idea to change the summary to "max total bet per number" - we've made this change.

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?

Good call! We've updated the style so that large wins and large wagers will be slightly wider and use a larger font. This is what we started doing in craps, but we hadn't adopted it to Roulette yet, so thanks for the heads-up!

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.

Another good catch! This is actually a bug we recently introduced, which is probably why you didn't notice it before. We added an invisible div over the board while it is spinning in order to prevent interaction with the board while it's in an active changing state. Unfortunately, we had the timing slightly off, which resulted in the weird behaviour you were experiencing. We've went ahead and fixed the timing.

As always, thank you so much Dooglus! I've added another 0.25 BTC to your account to thank you for constantly helping to make bitZino a better site.

We are planning on allowing users to opt to require an email confirmation before withdrawing any funds, changing the email address, or changing their password.

That still doesn't protect the person whose computer used for withdrawing is compromised, but it does at least provide more security than simple username and password.  With the ability to play on unconfirmed deposits, there  is no need to hold a large balance in the account.  Thus this proposed e-mail based secondary authentication step will probably be sufficient for most.

I've been thinking about this since you brought it up, and I think we're just gonna go all the way and implement true 2-factor auth using time based one-time-passwords, as specified by RFC 6238 (which is supported by Google Authenticator). It isn't much more complicated to implement or use, and it will offer much better security for people that are dealing with large amount of bitcoins.

best site so far for roulette and craps etc.
Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you're enjoying it

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[Stephen Gornick]

I see bitZino ads in the signature line by another forum member, in the format of
  bitzino.com/c/xxxxxx

Does bitZino have an affiliate program now?

[IveBeenBit]

Does Bitzino offer an affiliate program if we get new players to sign up?

[libertaad]

I see bitZino ads in the signature line by another forum member, in the format of
  bitzino.com/c/xxxxxx

Does bitZino have an affiliate program now?

You're very observant We don't have an affiliate program yet - those users are just being paid a flat fee to help endorse us.

Up until a few days ago, we hadn't done any marketing, and yet we continued to see steady growth. At this point though, we've officially started to experiment with some marketing. Our main focus will continue to be on building the best product possible though!

[mem]

Keep up the great work

[dooglus]

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?

This is not actually the case. The "Outer Wagers" includes both the row bets and the [1st|2nd|3rd] 12 bets.

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.

As always, thank you so much Dooglus! I've added another 0.25 BTC to your account to thank you for constantly helping to make bitZino a better site.

Thanks.  And you're welcome.

[dooglus]

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.

[libertaad]

Keep up the great work

Thanks

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.

Ah, thanks for your persistence in describing this! I have been able to replicate it now. This is indeed is a bug, which we'll fix shortly.

We are treating the "[1st|2nd|3rd] 12" bets as other wages in that you can bet up to 10 BTC on them - however, we are erroneously counting bets on them against the individual number bets, which shouldn't be happening.

...

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.

We are aware that the 'bet per click' value doesn't correctly persist on page reloads, and we're actually in the process of fixing that now.

However, the other numbers you saw are much more strange. I suspect that this has to do with how Chromium handles restoring pages after a restart. We make use of AJAX page updates, so it's possible that Chromium simply restores that page without accounting for the AJAX updates that occurred. I suspect that if you had tried to place a bet when it was in this state, our page would have showed you and "Out of Sync" alert, and forced a page refresh.

Nonetheless, I'll definitely be looking into this further. It would be ideal if we could get Chromium (and I'm sure Chrome) to behave more correctly when it restarts.

[dooglus]

Ah, thanks for your persistence in describing this! I have been able to replicate it now. This is indeed is a bug, which we'll fix shortly.

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

However, the other numbers you saw are much more strange. I suspect that this has to do with how Chromium handles restoring pages after a restart.

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.

[dooglus]

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?

Good call! We've updated the style so that large wins and large wagers will be slightly wider and use a larger font. This is what we started doing in craps, but we hadn't adopted it to Roulette yet, so thanks for the heads-up!

It looks better in roulette now:

[dooglus]

We are aware that the 'bet per click' value doesn't correctly persist on page reloads, and we're actually in the process of fixing that now.

However, the other numbers you saw are much more strange. I suspect that this has to do with how Chromium handles restoring pages after a restart. We make use of AJAX page updates, so it's possible that Chromium simply restores that page without accounting for the AJAX updates that occurred. I suspect that if you had tried to place a bet when it was in this state, our page would have showed you and "Out of Sync" alert, and forced a page refresh.

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.

[dooglus]

What's going on here?  "Your bitcoin deposit address: Available balance".



It doesn't tell me my deposit address.

Clicking "Or play with play money" then "play with bitcoins" fixed the problem.

[libertaad]

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.

We are indeed planning on exposing an interface for downloading your hand history. In the meantime, you can email support, and we'll provide you with your history over a certain period of time.

It looks better in roulette now:

Good

What's going on here?  "Your bitcoin deposit address: Available balance".



It doesn't tell me my deposit address.

Clicking "Or play with play money" then "play with bitcoins" fixed the problem.

Thant is a strange one! I've never seen that happen before, but we'll be sure to keep an eye out for it and fix it if we can. Also, let me know if you find a way to replicate it.

[ErebusBat]

dooglus,

You should consider a career as a software QA person.

[dooglus]

dooglus,

You should consider a career as a software QA person.

Ew, that sounds like work.  

In other news, I found another annoyance.  I have a bet of 2000 on a red.  I want to change it to 2100, so I click the existing 2000 bet, click between the 2nd and 3rd digit of the 2000, moving the cursor there:



then hit backspace to delete the first 0:



and finally type '1' to insert a 1 where the first '0' used to be:



As you can see, hitting backspace moves the cursor to the end of the bet amount, so when I type '1' I end up with 2001 and not 2100.  Almost everything I do moves the cursor to the end of the text field, which is kind of annoying, and makes it hard to edit the bet amount.  It's easier to just delete it and type the whole new value from scratch.

Edit: I discovered I can change 2000 to 2100 by selecting the 1st '0' by dragging the mouse over it:



and then typing a '1':



It still moves the text cursor to the end of the amount, which looks weird, but at least now I can make single-digit changes without having to retype the whole amount.

Edit2: note that the "bet per click" box has none of these problems.  The cursor keys work correctly there, and I am free to edit the number in the manner to which I have become accustomed on every other site on the web.

[libertaad]

We just pushed a bunch of fixes for all the issues you've been bringing up Dooglus. I also added another 0.25 BTC to your account to thank you for all the help you've provided us. This offer stands for anyone else too!

Fixes include:

- Correctly calculate min-bet in Roulette
- Preserve bet per click in Roulette between page refreshes
- Fix annoyance with changing bet values in Roulette and Craps (Re: #msg1291626)

We're also keeping an eye out for issues with the deposit address not showing up and the page not correctly refreshing on browser restart in Chrom[e|ium]. We haven't been able to replicate these, but we will likely fix the deposit address issue when we roll out our redesigned Buy-in window UI.

We're also working on adding additional varieties of Video Poker and adding Three Card Poker.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

[dooglus]

We just pushed a bunch of fixes for all the issues you've been bringing up Dooglus. I also added another 0.25 BTC to your account to thank you for all the help you've provided us. This offer stands for anyone else too!

Thanks for the 250k uBTC. 

I thought I had found another bug - maybe one to keep to myself for a bit.  I got my balance up to 1.6 BTC, placed a largish bet on the roulette table, but then clicked 'cash out' before spinning the wheel.  My balance went to 1.85 BTC.  I figured you had accidentally added the placed-but-not-spun bet to my balance twice.

Then I checked the 'deposit' page and saw it was another thank you deposit. 

One issue this brought up for me was that the timestamp on the deposits is in UTC.  I thought UTC was 8 hours ahead of here, which would have made the 0.25 deposit just about 61 minutes ago, in which case I was wondering why you hadn't posted about it.  But I guess UTC is only 7 hours ahead of here, and you had made the 0.25 BTC deposit into my account before composing your post here.  What I'm trying to say is I'd like to see all timestamps in localtime, not UTC.  Maybe let me pick a timezone, or maybe trust that my browser knows what timezone I'm in, I don't really care which.

[Stephen Gornick]

If I am not watching my balance, I might end up without enough at the table to double down or split.  Isn't a buy-in something I should be allowed to do at any point?

You can indeed add extra balance to the table at any time, even mid-hand. If you click on your balance (right above the "Split" button), you'll see a popup which allows you to add balance.

I wonder if there's a good way to make it more obvious that that is a click-able element. I was thinking of just adding a help bubble when the table is first created that informs the user that you can click there to add balance at any point...

i think that is fine, I guess what is throwing me off is that the button for DOUBLE is not enabled because of my insufficient balance.  If I'm new, I might think the game isn't allowing me to double down.

Perhaps the button should be enabled but if I click on it, it displays a message telling me that I need to click Buy In to add more funds in order to double down.

[Daily Anarchist]

You don't consider card counting cheating? That's awesome! How many decks of cards are used in each game of blackjack?

[Stephen Gornick]

You don't consider card counting cheating? That's awesome! How many decks of cards are used in each game of blackjack?

Dooglus answered this earlier:

They use 8 decks and shuffle before every hand.

You can see that 8 decks are used by opening up the 'provably fair' sub-window and counting the length of the "final shuffle" string.  Reading the "what is this?" link in the bottom right corner of that sub-window makes it clear that they shuffle before dealing every hand.