EDIT: you might want to read one of my later replies first...
Whenever anyone wants to know if a gambling site is rigging the game, they run a sort of brute force test. That's when they play a ton of hands to see if it's either letting them win for the first couple hands or making them lose more than the odds of the game suggest. The Wizard of Ods is famous for doing that and found some semi-high profile gambling sites were rigging it so people won with their free initial buy in credits more than they should and then lowering the odds after that to below normal game levels. He usually plays 1000 hands but I'm not that patient
so I tested BTCFlip with 50 bets
The results were *drum roll*...
26 losses and 24 wins. They pay a 1% bet commission on referrals and obviously keep a bit of a advantage to themselves but these numbers indicate that it's not like a 20% advantage or something. That suggests a 2% advantage but don't think that number is set in stone because 50 is not a big enough test to dial it in precisely. The results were:
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winwinso it seems that there are no conditions under which it gives an advantage or disadvantage. They certainly weren't letting me win right at the start lol. Just for fun, I ran a few bets that were much, much larger than their 0.01 minimum and lost 3 and won 2 which doesn't say much other there's not a 100% "they win" clause in their randomization code for high BTC amounts
can't really comment on whether or not they up the odds at all in that case though.
By the way, I actually played 51 rounds and it dropped one of my bets. It timed out and they said they never got it but I checked and the correct amount was sent to the correct address. I was running all of these in firefox but I opened IE because of the view source feature to see if there were any hints or exposed code on the page and that's the one that got dropped so maybe it's not IE9 friendly or something. It is all javascript based so who knows.
So my overall result is with no account or other apparent way of tracking a deposited bet, if anything happens to the page or their server mid-game, you're screwed, making it pretty unsafe. Also, they don't list any information on the odds or have any guarantee that they don't change so that's pretty sketchy. Why would anyone (other than me
) play a game that doesn't list the odds of winning? Other than that, from an odds point of view, it's at least somewhat close to 50-50 and appears to have no larger of an advantage than any casino game so if you want to go for it, go for it
EDIT: oh yeah, I should probably mention that I won 24 times and there are 24 payouts from them in my bitcoin client log so they also do pay you if you win
That seems to be an important part of any gambling site review lol.