Playing Slots with an Edge in Casino Tournaments.
Part 4 of my slot tournament series: bonus meters, 43,000x, and why hesitating cost us the prize
It’s been a while, but here’s the final part. Earlier in this series I explained how to maximize winnings by picking high volatility slots. Sometimes the expected cost was around $10,000 to land a 20,000x multiplier and take the $100,000 first place prize, which made these leaderboards extremely profitable. In this final part I'll cover the exploit method for pulling big multipliers out of slots with a bonus accumulation feature.
First, a quick recap of the mechanics. A round is 100 spins, and every multiplier you hit within that round is added together. Your best round is the one that counts toward the leaderboard. It all comes down to landing one 20,000x hit or bigger in a single round, because hitting 10,000x twice within 100 spins is statistically close to impossible.
The organizers kept trying to set up conditions where advantage players couldn’t get an edge, and with every tournament the terms got tighter.
First they pulled Dead or Alive 2 from the game list. Then Emerald King Rainbow Road. After they cut Bandits Thunder Link, there were basically no suitable slots left.
Later they capped the number of spins too: first at 100,000 for the duration of the tournament, then at 10,000. For comparison, playing 7 days straight around the clock, I could get through roughly 230,000 spins. So a 10,000 spin cap left almost no chance of building up a big multiplier legitimately.
By that point we were already scraping data from dozens of slots, looking for the one that would let us land a big win in a reasonable number of spins. Nothing worthwhile turned up. On most slots, even a 5000x or 10,000x needed millions of spins.
So for a while we played Rise of Merlin on a single line, and we also tried Big Blue Bounty purely on luck. There was no way to scrape it since it didn’t even have a demo mode, but it did offer a shot at 20,000x.
On Rise of Merlin you could pull a 5000x once every quarter million spins on average. Then we found the legendary Fruit Party, where a 5000x came up every 88,230 spins. That’s genuinely fast, and I went on to use that slot for smaller tournaments many times afterward. We also found Cat Wilde and the Lost Chapter, where a 10,000x showed up once in a million spins. So we kept collecting big multipliers, but it still wasn’t enough to break into even the top 5 and go after the $30,000 to $100,000 prizes.
Even so, some players were pulling multipliers above 20,000x over and over. I didn’t believe that was possible legitimately with that lineup of slots. Either players in different countries had access to different games, or the results were fake, or there was some clever trick involved, like that time you could bet $20 on Sticky Fruits Classic and drop down to the minimum stake right before you only had 1 or 2 fruits left to collect for the bonus.
When that slot showed up in one of the races again, the leaderboard looked like everyone had suddenly started winning absurd amounts. The problem was that across 100 spins you could only pull the trick off a couple of times, and you couldn’t get past 5000x. Meanwhile the competition was now hitting 30,000x and up.
Here’s what it came down to. The sequence was:
Opt out of the tournament.
Fill the meter at max bet, almost to the end.
Join the tournament.
Drop the bet to the minimum.
Trigger the bonus at a medium bet.
Opt out again, fill the meter back up, and rejoin.
That way almost every one of your 100 spins delivered a multiplier of 500, 1000, or more. You weren’t burning rounds to fill the meter! First place, for example, finished with a total multiplier of 57,289, and second place had 43,615.
Around 20 people used this loophole to take the top spots.
Was it fair to the other players? Probably not. Could anyone have figured it out? Sure. Would every player actually figure it out? Obviously not.
We found the method but didn’t use it. Think it was because of our high moral standards? No, we just messed up. We decided to wait a bit and see what the results looked like by the end of the race so we could judge our chances better. But while we were waiting, the slot disappeared from the available list, leaving us without even a theoretical shot at a meaningful prize. The edge went to whoever used the loophole first.
Lesson learned.
In one of the following races, the slot Hellcatraz showed up. You had to collect 2000 keys to unlock the bonus game. That let you farm keys at a high stake, then lower it and cash the win in at a medium stake.
We stocked up on keys before the race even started so we’d be first to use the slot. The moment it began, all of our players ran their first bonus, and the best result was 43,000x. And you could still drop out of the race, farm more keys, and push the result to genuinely absurd numbers.
Luckily it never came to that. They pulled the slot barely 15 minutes after the start. Nobody had time to catch us. We took the top two spots plus a bunch of other places in the top, and won a six figure sum again.
That’s where the big races ended. They were replaced by weekly and daily ones with small prize pools, and those are still running. Right now, for example, there’s a race with a $10,000 pool and a $1,000 first place prize.
They changed the mechanics too: now only multipliers up to 1000x count, and sometimes the cap is 100x. Even so, people are making the leaderboard with more than 1180 in a single round. Just to be sure, I decided to recheck this with a more advanced method than I’d used before. Previously I calculated the probability of landing a 1000x plus another 180. Now I account for the whole distribution, because it could just as easily be 980x and 200, or 1000x plus a few small hits.
On Fruit Party, beating that record takes 260,300 spins. On The Dog House it takes 270,000. At 20 cents a spin with a 3.5% house edge, that’s about $1,822 and $1,890 respectively. So the cost of winning comes out higher than the prize itself, and with the 100 round cap it gets stretched out over a very long time on top of that.
And yet the same nicknames keep showing up in the prizes. On the Casinomeister forum, posts pop up now and then saying something strange is going on there.
Maybe some AP has found a method nobody else knows about. Or maybe it’s the casino cheating. Personally I believe the first one. And you?
P.S. The casino never took any action against the players who claimed prize spots this way. The only thing they did was pull slots once they realized there was a loophole. And when they pulled one in the middle of a race, it left participants on unequal footing, which in my view isn’t really fair.
You’d be unlikely to get off that easily at some offshore operation, where you’d probably get banned, have your winnings voided, or even confiscated.
There was a similar episode at Duel, by the way, a casino that’s trending right now and has a good reputation. In their tournaments, points were awarded based on the house edge. A player running a 4% house edge earned twice as many points as one running 2%.
On some slots the bonus buy RTP is higher than the RTP of the base game. So you’re playing a slot with 96% RTP and buying a bonus that runs at 98%, but you’re credited with points as if you were still playing at 96%.
The players who caught this first were racking up points at a much lower cost. Once the casino figured it out, they removed those players from the tournament and recalculated the points at the correct rate, though as far as I know they still paid out the prize money for the places that had already been taken.
So when you get an edge, you’d better be very sure someone is actually going to pay you for it.