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.
