The Lucky Donut

What’s wrong with this picture?  I’ve taken the liberty of enlarging the relevant text (or you can click to view the full original screenshot).

Balance £3.  Which means I have insufficient funds to place a £2 bet.

Let me try to take a stab at explaining what kind of logic is needed to come to this absurd conclusion.

Three Card Poker requires you to place an additional bet equal to your ante if you want to play the hand.  You can fold and forfeit the ante – but if giving up without a chance is only option you wouldn’t start the hand in the first place.  So in fact this £2 bet (including a £1 “pair plus” prop bet) actually needs me to have £3 in my balance to play it.

Which, it appears, I do.

[Side note: This is different to blackjack, where the game will never stop you from dealing a hand if you don’t have enough money to double down or split a pair.  You are at least able to complete the hand and stand a chance of winning something without using these options.]

However we already know that Gala suffers from fraction-of-a-penny rounding errors.  It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that their bodgeroonie of a cashier system actually thinks my balance is very slightly below £3, but close enough to it that it is rounded up when displayed.

It’ll be some number like £2.999999995673, so that when asked “does he have at least £3?” then answer will be “ooooooh not quite”.

I see this kind of rounding error fairly often when working with decimal numbers.  It’s because computers suck at fractions.  Everything has to be stored internally as some representation of a power of 2, so only fractions with a denominator of 2, 4, 8, 16, etc can be stored exactly.

When working in hundredths, that’s just 4% of all numbers: those ending in .00, .25, .50 or .75; everything else is going to be converted to a (fairly long) decimal approximation; close, but not precise.  However, if you know that it happens, it’s not that hard to deal with.

Notably in the poker and casino operator APIs I’ve worked with, you don’t need to worry about this.  They have always stored and returned the player balance numbers as a whole number of pence or cents.  It makes it pretty easy to accidentally conjure money out of thin air – you just have to forget to divide by 100 one time – but it means that there are never any fractions of a penny floating around the system to go wrong.

In fact, some poker networks even store and return your player points balance as a whole number of hundredths of a point.  I guess they really don’t want to give much away!

My assumption is that Gala’s cashier system stores the casino balances as pounds and pence – a design decision that has side effects they either don’t know about or don’t care about.  For a system that handles real money transactions this is, frankly, a bit poo.

And if anyone from Gala actually reads this: yes, I could do (and have done) better.  Let’s talk.

Anyway, there’s more.  I really can’t begin to explain what the hell is going on this time.  The dealer’s cards were dealt, briefly flashing face up – but too quickly for me to remember what it showed.  They flipped over as soon as they were dealt, and then the game announced the apparent straight flush for the dealer you (don’t) see here.  Like I’m just meant to believe that?

“NaN” means “not a number”.  Or, in English, “something fucked up”.

Isn’t it great to know that when the game software has a glitch, the default behaviour is to give the dealer the very best hand possible?

Online gambling… probably rigged… yada yada yada.  I had 13 straight roulette spins landing on red.

Unfortunately I didn’t record the action itself, but I made this video of scrolling through my session results history afterwards.  Just hit the play button and count along.

It’s like thousands to one against.

To be more precise, 8191-1 for a streak of either colour, or 4095-1 for either streak (because I’d still be writing this if it had been 13 blacks).

It’s not astronomical odds, but it’s enough to make you sit up and take notice.

Also, I was betting on red, even, low.  Only five numbers lose everything: 29, 31, 33, 35 and 0.  Losing 3 times in a row is a 404-1 shot, yet that’s what happened right before the 13 reds: 31, 31, 0.

Also, if you didn’t notice, the last 7 numbers were red and odd.

Draw your own wild conclusions.  Conspiracy theories are always welcome.

It’s time for another randomly-generated-by-computer-using-a-secret-magic-formula virtual game from Sporting Index, which I’m only playing because they promised to refund up £50 of my losses.

To qualify for the refund, I have to place 10 or more bets at a minimum 20p per point stake.  After grinding through the first 9, I was £5.43 up.  Reasonable, but not enough to make it worth quitting just yet when I was in a situation where I could place a bet worth up to £55.43 and have it cost me no more than £5.43.

I don’t actually know where I should draw the line here.  Free money in the bank is good, but the chance of a better return for almost no risk is obviously attractive.  I think if I’d won £20 before qualifying for the refund, I’d probably be bottling it and taking their money even though it’s almost certainly in my favour to keep playing.

If I knew how the game worked, I could make an informed decision on how best to play this bonus through, but when the game is themed to look like a real world event, yet the outcomes are calculated in a way that you’re not meant to understand, you just have to trust that it’s not completely rigged.

I’m pretty confident that Sporting Index would not be associated with an outright scam, and although the game is surely very juicy for them, I’m assuming that it has a house edge somewhat smaller than 90%.  In which case letting my fiver ride is a good play.

The game in question is a random number generator painted to look a bit like the stock market.  You get to pick from three made up currency exchanges, each with its own degree of simulated volatility.

Then you can bet on one or more of the following markets.  I’ve condensed the display down after selecting a direction for each one to show the best and worst case scenario for each bet.

There are two distinct types of bets here: ones with a small downside and a large potential upside, and those where the swings are roughly the same size in either direction.

Of course, to win big money from any spread bet you need an extremely unusual event to occur.  Usually the result will be fairly close to the spread itself, resulting in a (relatively) small win or a small loss.

This is not great for exploiting a net loss refund offer.  Ideally we want to take one shot where we either lose the maximum (in this case lose £55.43, ending up with a net loss of £50, which will be refunded in full) or win something significant.

To play out the promotion, I decided to take the highest price bet.  Lowest price or even swing would have pretty much the same effect, but it just felt right to be cheering for the imaginary graph to be rise upwards rather than downwards.

With a stake of £2.21 per point (maximum risk: £55.25, maximum win: £828.75) and buying the market at 5025 here’s what happened:

Yeah I couldn’t work it out either.  It’s the blue line that matters, but even so… I had to let it tell me the result and trust that it was right.  Apparently I lost £30.94.

Looking at this chart a little bit closer, it was almost impossible to pick a winner this time.  The swing on the green line may have just got there, but I don’t think any of these graphs moved enough to cover the spread in either direction.  From the house’s point of view, it’s almost as good as a roulette wheel throwing up a zero.

It’s not all over though.  I could still have another £24.49 of losses refunded, so although the chances of getting back into the black were slim there was nothing to lose by taking another shot.

Same bet, slightly cheaper.  Buying the blue line for 98p per point: maximum risk £24.50, maximum win £367.50.

Awesome.  Lost another £17.64.

It’s not actually the extent of the downward plummet that’s bad for this bet, it’s that the graph never went much above its starting value. But the extreme downswing does rub it in a little, and it means that if I’d put money on either lowest price or swing – the two other candidates for this bet – I’d have been back in the game.

So, one more last, desperate effort.  Could I climb out of a £43.15 hole with just £6.85 left to play with?

Maximum loss: £6.75, actual loss £6.48.  That would be a no then. 

Gala.  Giving away money again.  This is not how casinos are meant to operate.

I deposited £10 for today’s bonus and it didn’t work.  So I tried transferring the money via my poker balance to see how much they’d sting me on the exchange rate.

I started with £38.22.

I transferred £20 to poker, which was converted to $30.62.

Then, I wasn’t sure whether the amount to transfer back was in pounds or dollars.  I entered “20” in the currency-less field and pressed “go”.

That meant $20, apparently, which converted back at £13.07.  Then I transferred the remaining dollars back to pounds.

I made a penny.  In fact, I made two.  After I noticed this had happened, I had to try to reproduce it to get the screen grabs above.

I’ve contacted customer support about this.  While the idea of making a bit of money Office Space (or Superman III) style is attractive, PMITA prison is not so much.

EDIT: Bizarrely today my balance shows as £38.22 on the homepage and £38.23 in the cashier.  Looks like they are storing balances internally accurate to fractions of a penny, then rounding differently in different places.

Not content with giving away money through three very playable bonus offers every week, Gala have just announced the following change to their cashier system that’s going to cost them even more:

Improvements to the “Cashier” function will display funds within 2 wallets – a Casino/Sports balance and a Poker balance.  [ … ] We’ve just made things easier for you – and there’s no need to transfer funds from one wallet to another!

If you want to apply for one of our bonuses, please make sure that you enter the bonus code when depositing, as you will no longer be able to transfer funds and enter the bonus code at that point.

Until now there were three separate balances; Casino and Sports both in pounds and Poker in US Dollars.

Admittedly, their cashier has always been a little clunky, so any change that results in players needing to use it less often is probably a smart move.

Now rather than keeping my balance in Gala and simply transferring money back and forth, entering each daily bonus code to qualify for that chunk of free money, I’m going to have to use a debit card several times every week.

Although the option to enter a bonus code still seems to be available for transfers between Casino/Sports and Poker, this will involve an exchange into US Dollars and back again and, inevitablly, the punter will pay commission both ways.

The more attractive option is to make a £10 qualifying deposit on Friday for Blackjack, one on Saturday for Roulette and another on Monday for Three Card Poker, then withdraw it all after playing the Monday bonus.  Rinse and repeat.

It costs Gala nothing to transfer money from one virtual pot to another, but as soon as a bank is involved they’re going to be paying a fee with every transaction.  For gambling transactions, those fees are pretty steep.

So while I’m sure it was their intention to encourage players to put money into their accounts in exchange for the bonus, what they’ve actually ended up doing is paying four lots of transaction fees in addition to giving away an expected value of about £22/week.

My main worry is that their systems will be set to detect repeated deposits and withdrawals and flag them for inspection – whereas shifting money around between their online accounts would not arouse any suspicion.

I’ll still be making hay while the sun shines though, and if you’re not already taking advantage of these bonuses, get them before Gala works out how much they are costing!