Playing with an Edge in Slot Tournaments: $1,8M in 14 Months. Part 3
The next chapter in our race for an edge
Previous parts: Part 1 | Part 2
The Sixth Race: Uncertainty
After the fifth race, we were on an emotional high. Emerald King Rainbow Road had brought us over $200,000. But I knew it wouldn’t last. The casino had clearly noticed that all top wins were coming from the same slot.
And that’s exactly what happened. At the end of January they announced the sixth race. I immediately opened the list of eligible games, scanning for familiar titles. Emerald King was gone. As before, we had one week to prepare.
I opened our Google Sheets file to mark which slots had been removed and to add the new ones. Meanwhile, the data-parsing process was crawling. Most of my time went not into analysis, but into managing programmers. The results were often messy or irrelevant. Things kept breaking. Some people didn’t want to work on it anymore, and we constantly had to look for replacements and verify every output by hand.
We tested around twenty slots—nothing clicked. Low volatility, small wins, nothing that came close to Emerald King or Dead or Alive 2.
Eventually we narrowed it down to two candidates. The first was Star Joker by Play’n GO, with a max win of 5,000х every 180,000 spins. Good math, but not enough to get near the top ten.
The second looked more promising for a win, but made no mathematical sense at all: Great Blue by Playtech, with a potential of up to 150,000х.
The problem was no one knew the real odds. In theory it sounded perfect: play one payline, trigger the bonus, land a 15х multiplier, collect five sharks—10,000х total—and hit 150,000х overall. Sounds simple. In practice, Playtech encrypted all server responses. Extracting meaningful data was impossible. We couldn’t estimate real probabilities.
We collected about 20,000 spins, looked at the variance, and decided to go for it.
Competitors Take the Lead
On the very first day someone hit exactly 15,000х. Where did that happen? Did someone find the right slot already?
The only game that matched was Crystal Quest: Arcane Tower by Yggdrasil—its maximum win was 15,000х. Every other slot had a higher or lower cap.
I double-checked our data on it. Even if that 15,000х came from Arcane Tower, the odds were slim. Our dataset: one million spins, and the best result we’d ever seen was 1,177х. Maybe someone got insanely lucky… or maybe we just didn’t collect enough data.
If the max win dropped once every 400,000 spins (like Emerald King Rainbow Road), the mathematical chance not to see it in a million spins was 8.4%. If it was rarer, say once every 500,000, that chance rose to 13.5%.
Meaning: about one in ten times, after grinding a million spins, we’d see no max win and assume the slot was worthless. I realized that only now, while writing this text—back then we just kept chasing sharks.
A few days later, a new leader appeared with a 20,000х hit. Our best score was 8,173х, and hopes for a top finish were fading fast. We needed to figure out what slots were producing these numbers—and whether it was luck or a pattern.
Two games fit the description. The first, Great Rhino Megaways by Pragmatic Play, I could rule out immediately: the chance of hitting its 20,000х cap was 1 in 266 million. For comparison, your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot — 1 in 292 million — are actually better. You can read my previous post about +EV in lotteries.
The second looked more plausible: Big Blue Bounty, an exclusive PokerStars slot. It had just been released, with a banner proudly stating “MAX WIN 20,000х.” But it had no demo mode, meaning no way to parse data.
No other games offered a 20,000х cap. We were left with two blind options: keep grinding Great Blue, or switch to Big Blue Bounty—also blind, but much slower. The game was packed with animations; spins took forever.
Our Results
In the end we played both. I hit 10,831x in Great Blue. But that was as good as it got. The top two players finished with 20,000x each. Third and fourth both had 15,000x.
We placed fifth and seventh—$30,000 and $20,000. Plus smaller finishes at 25th and 27th ($5,000 and $6,000) and a few scattered minor prizes. Around $50,000 total profit.
Modest compared to previous races, but still a win. And we had a full month before the next one—to figure out where to play next.
The Warning
Finding the right slot wasn’t our only problem. A few days after the race ended, the casino’s security team reached out. Their message made everyone nervous.
They suspected the use of “unauthorized software.” The message said that the casino had noticed “non-typical gaming activity that may indicate automated play providing an unfair advantage.”
They cited section 5.6 of the Terms of Service: any use of artificial intelligence or automated tools is strictly prohibited. All actions must be performed manually through the user interface.
The tone was oddly forgiving. They assumed I “might not be aware of the restriction” and asked me simply to confirm by email that I understood the policy and wouldn’t use such tools again.
Obviously, they were talking about the autoclicker. “Unusual activity” referred to continuous sessions running for an entire week without breaks for sleep—something no human could do.
It was serious. My account balance stood at $162,000; Artur’s—my main partner in all this—had nearly $200,000. Others had tens of thousands each. We spent hours arguing what to reply—or whether to reply at all.
Eventually we agreed to respond and confirm we understood. The real debate was whether to stop using the autoclicker. I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Artur disagreed—he argued it was undetectable as long as we took short breaks. We both stuck to our choices.
What surprised us most was that the casino didn’t freeze accounts, confiscate winnings, or apply any sanctions at all. They just warned us—and left the balances intact.
The Seventh Race: Dead or Alive Reborn
After that warning, it was clear we were under watch. Stopping wasn’t an option, but we had to be careful. During the prep week for the next race, I went through the list of available games as usual.
One new release instantly caught my attention: Bandits Thunder Link by Stakelogic. I opened the demo and froze. It was a Dead or Alive 2 clone.
Same Wild West theme, similar graphics, almost identical mechanics. The only difference: instead of the “Old Saloon” bonus it had “Thunder Link,” a feature similar to Money Train. The max win was lower—50,000x versus 111,111x—but the structure was unmistakable.
Even without data I could tell: this was the one. Still, we needed proof. The programmers got to work. Collecting one million spins in demo mode took several days. First, they simulated a million with the Wild Bonanza bonus—the equivalent of High Noon Saloon in DOA2.
Then another million feature buys, to capture bonus distribution and volatility precisely. It took time. The final data came after the race had already started. The result stunned me: one max-win every 3 million spins.
In Dead or Alive 2, the odds of hitting a 50,000x win were twice as bad — around six million spins. Another bonus was that the casino had lowered the minimum bet for the race from $0.50 to $0.20. Playing became cheaper, while the prizes stayed the same.
By that point, our best score was 15,130х, but the leaderboard still showed competitors hitting 20,000х. We, however, had an ace up our sleeve: a higher cap (50,000x) and enough accounts to exploit a 1-in-3-million shot.
Sixteen Players
The team had grown to sixteen people: close friends, their girlfriends and wives, brothers, cousins—only those we could completely trust.
Everyone played Bandits Thunder Link for hours, taking short breaks to avoid drawing attention. Not sure that helped — one of our accounts hit the 50,000x max win and took first place.
By the end of the seventh race we held the 1st, 7th, 8th, and 9th places, plus smaller wins further down. Over $200,000 total.
I opened the final leaderboard:
1st — 50,052x
2nd — 44,250x
3rd — 25,971x
4th–6th — exactly 20,000x
Then ours: 19,200x, 18,162x, 15,136x.
10th — 14,466x.
Judging by that second-place result, someone else had also figured out Bandits Thunder Link. Others were still farming consistent 20,000x results. But with sixteen accounts, competition barely mattered.
The Discovery
A few days later, the programmer sent the final dataset — every bonus buy feature and every game mechanic. I loaded it into Power BI to calculate probabilities and compare max-win frequencies across bonus types.
When I saw the Thunder Link data, I froze. 549,246 spins per max-win. I triple-checked. No error. That was six times better than the Wild Bonanza mode we had used all race—and ten times better than Dead or Alive 2.
I grabbed my phone, hands shaking slightly.
Called Artur. He answered.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said. “We were playing the wrong slot.”
Silence on the line. Then:
“What do you mean wrong? Did you see our results?”
“Yeah, but they could’ve been better. The slot was right—the bonus wasn’t. The far-right one is always the most volatile. Same as DOA2.”
“How much more volatile?”
“Max win six times more frequent.”
“F***… if only they don’t remove it.”
The Eighth Race: Total Domination
April 23, 18:00.
I opened the site to check the announcement for the next race. It was on. And Bandits Thunder Link was still there.
April 29, 18:00.
The race began. All sixteen of us started grinding Bandits Thunder Link, choosing the Thunder Link bonus every time.
Now we were ready to take it all. The first day flew by. I kept refreshing the leaderboard—nothing major yet. Regular wins, nothing big.
The next morning someone dropped a screenshot in the group chat. 50,000x. Our first max win.
The following days blurred into one long marathon. I barely left my desk. No time to sleep. Ate while watching the screen. Refreshed the leaderboard every thirty minutes, tracking positions and competitors.
Then another 50,000x. And another—mine this time. By the final day the leaderboard looked absurd: The top seven spots—all 50,000x. Four of them ours: 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 7th. Another at 11th. Every account but one landed in the top 100; most in the top 30.
Scrolling further down, players with “just” 20,000x wins sat at 12th and 13th. In past races, those would’ve been first place. Now they didn’t even crack the top ten.
When it was over, I tallied the results: just shy of $300,000 in total winnings. We took four of the top seven spots—our best result ever. My account balance stood at $273,157. I didn’t rush to withdraw; part of me hoped we’d still catch a jackpot.
But there was no doubt: the slot would be removed. Too many people had figured it out. The casino wanted races where anyone could win—or at least where they could control who did. And with each race, they were getting better at it.
After this one, winning would never be the same again.
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