If I recall correctly, BetKing was offering somewhere around 450 Bitcoin Max bet when the bankroll was at 4500 Bitcoin? If this max bet won, regardless of what you had invested, you would stand to lose 10% for the bet and another 2.5% (?) for the commission for -12.5% of your investment from one bet.
I think you may have it wrong. BetKing was allowing each investor to set their own 'Kelly multiplier". If a player won 10% of the bankroll that loss would have been borne by those investors with the highest Kelly multipliers. Any investor with a regular 1x multiplier would have lost no more than 1% of their investment on any roll. It's not unreasonable to allow investors to use high leverage so they don't have to expose themselves to so much counterparty risk so long as you don't force it on everyone.
Also, the commission was 25% of the profits plus 25% of the house edge. In the case of a winning player there's no profit, so the commission is just 25% of the house edge, or 25% of 1% of the stake, or 0.25% of the stake.
Since it's the max profit per bet that is fixed and not the max stake, the commission depends on the payout multiplier. If the winning player bet at 98% (a roughly 1.010204x payout multiplier) to win 450 BTC profit, their stake would need to be 44100 BTC, and the commission on that bet would be 0.25% of that, or 110.25 BTC, in which case the investor at 1x Kelly would be losing 1.245% of their investment at most.
At the other extreme, if the winning play bet at 0.0001% (a 990,000x payout multiplier) to win 450 BTC profit, their stake would need to be just 0.00045454 BTC, and so the commission on that bet would be pretty much zero, and the investor ends up losing at most 1.00000101% of their investment.
All this is moot now of course since betking is moving from a model where investors get to keep 50% of the expected profit (before expenses) and can divest whenever they like to a new exciting model where they keep 30% of the profit (after expenses) and cannot divest.
Always nice to have an accurate and insightful post from dooglus
Thanks for clarifying. That makes more sense for the calculations.
I understand the reasoning behind allowing for Kelly (trying to make it so that investors have less exposure), but it seemed like everyone preferred to use 10x Kelly with their full investment (I'd imagine most players on JD have max leverage as well) which went against what was initially trying to be accomplished.
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Would this hypothetical scenario then be right for BetKing's old model?
An investor has 400 Bitcoin invested at 10x Kelly which represents 10% of the entire bankroll (4000 Bitcoin).
A whale bets 400 Bitcoin at 50% and wins.
Commission taken is 400 * 0.0025 = 1 Bitcoin and the total bankroll loss is 401 Bitcoin.
Bankroll is now 4000 - 401 = 3,599 Bitcoin.
The investor still holds 10% of the entire bankroll and his investment is now 359.9 Bitcoin.
The investor's loss on a single wager (40.1 BTC) is 10.025% of their investment.
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Also, if the argument for why BetKing had much better bankroll management than BitVest was the option for 1x Kelly, Bitvest also allows 1x Kelly.
Furthermore, not to knock on Crypto-games (I think they run their site well), limiting their max win to 0.5% of older than 1 week bankroll (currently 5.73 BTC) does not guarantee that a whale can't come in and do some great damage (N8snathan did heavy damage within this exact range of betting to Bitvest).
My point is I still think these decisions and charts made by coingamblingreviews for where to invest are being based off of recent results which in a sense is just guessing and gambling (albeit at a +ev rate because all sites should yield positive earnings in the long run).
I agree it seems a bit hard on Bitvest, but I actually just looked at their chart today and at one point the site was down to 10 bitcoins profit over a year period. Horrible investment compared to the other ones in this thread if you actually look at the real returns.
The best thing about this thread is that we can look in hindsight and really see what was the best scenario and if the right moves were justified. I don't the OP is telling anyone to invest anywhere he is making decisions with his own money and if we don't like it we don't need to listen.
I agree that all sites should be EV positive in the long run but a lot of other factors like 'guessing' come into play. Such as:
- How much will people gamble on a site with regards to the bankroll?
- If there is a big Kelly option will most investors take it and force others too?
- If a site looks less appealing to play on will it get players in the long run?
- How trusted is the site?
My 2 cents worth