Playing with an Edge in Casino Tournaments: $1,800,000 in 14 Months

When knowledge of probability and basic math transforms gambling into advantage play.

The Million-Dollar Email

My life literally split into two parts: before October 1, 2020, and after. That Thursday evening, I received an email that kicked off an incredible adventure that continues to this day. It was a notification about a Slot Race with a prize pool of $1,000,000.

I never believed you could actually win anything significant in casino tournaments. Usually, high rollers who play with large bets take the prize positions but end up losing more than they win in prizes. But here, the prize pool was a whole million dollars, and even 10th place offered a solid $14,000 prize. I thought this might be interesting and set it aside until the weekend.

A Fortunate Discovery

Sunday evening, more out of boredom than anything else, I decided to dig into the tournament details. Surprisingly, this tournament wasn't being discussed anywhere online—information was only available on the casino's website. I reviewed the rules:

• Winning criterion: maximum multiplier (win coefficient relative to bet). Specifically, the sum of all multipliers after 100 spins.

• Unlimited attempts—only your best result counts.

• Minimum bet to play—one dollar.

To win, you needed just one lucky spin, and you didn't need to make thousands of max bets to win the top prize. This gave me hope for positive expected value. At the top of the leaderboard was a 7800x win. I had no idea if that was a lot or a little, or how difficult it would be to match.

It's not hard to figure out that knowing the RTP (Return to Player percentage) and the frequency of hitting a 7800x multiplier, you could calculate how much money you'd need to spend to get such a multiplier, then compare it to the $100,000 first prize. My intuition told me the game was worth playing. I just needed to calculate what was truly worth pursuing.

I already had some casino experience, mainly with bonuses, but I'd never hit even a 1000x multiplier. I needed to find information that wasn't available anywhere.

How Often Do Big Wins Happen?

I got lucky twice. First, when the email didn't go to spam. Second, when I remembered seeing a detailed mathematical analysis of several NetEnt slots by someone with a mathematical background in an online gambling discussion.

I found these analyses, and one of the slots was Dead or Alive 2 (DoA 2). This mathematician had somehow decoded the game's algorithm: identified which symbols appeared on the reels, their payouts, created a computer model of the slot, and ran tens of millions of virtual spins to verify the RTP and learn the frequency of large wins.

His conclusions were as follows:

• The RTP indeed matched what was advertised, and the demo version was no different from the original.

• Getting a 111,000x multiplier requires about 45 million spins on average.

• For a 10,000x multiplier—approximately 276,000 spins.

• For a 5,000x multiplier—approximately 115,000 spins.