This is your periodic reminder to never launch with a max bet that is not small enough compared to your bankrolll.
Your max bet should be
many, many times smaller than your bankroll.
E.g. Let's suppose I have a bankroll of $1000 (I know it's a terribly low amount, but this is what some people have to work with).
If I make the max bet $50, then people can bet 20 times (
and win all of them to finish it up.
Alternatively, if I make the max bet $20, people have to bet 50 times simultaneously.
Now let's suppose you have some probably fair game with 49% chance of winning - obviously most games have even lower probabilities than this, further reducing the chances of bankroll depletion - so that there's 1% house edge. So for those $20 bets, you will win on average 24 of them and lose the other 26.
26*$20 = +$520 that goes back to the bankroll. 24*$20 results in -$480 taken away from it (this amount
includes the 1% house edge the owners [you] take as profit). That means your bankroll increased by $40.
Also, .49
25 (this is 24+1, the minimum number of wins out of 50 necessary to report a net bankroll loss) is 0.00000001798465. In other words. 3.67e
-8 i.e
eight zeros after the decimal, or a 0.0000001798% chance that people will win more than they lose and send your bankroll down a spiral.
To put that into perspective, this will only happen every 55,602,972 * 50 = 2,780,148,626 bets: almost 3 billion bets. By comparison, Primedice (the oldest gambling site) just reached their 100 billionth bet a few days ago - over an 8 year period.
The same amounts with $50 max bet result in 9 wins against 11 losses. With -$450 against +$550 = +$100 net increase of bankroll per 20 bets (assuming everyone bets the max bet).
But crucially, the probability of net losses in your bankroll at $50 max bets is
much higher, at .49
10 = 0.000797922662976 or a staggering 0.07979% chance of sinking bankroll.
And even more shockingly, this event will happen every 1,253*20 =
25,065 bets!If your site had 1 bet being placed per minute (because it's small) then you would start noticing losses after just 17.4 days. If it was 1 bet per second like some larger sites, it wouldn't even last half of the day without a net loss.
That's why it's so important to crunch the numbers before you start because if you make your max wager too high, it won't sustain your bankroll! Even a slight decrease in max bet will lower the probability of bankroll net losses!
Almost all games have a less than 50% chance win rate or else their bankroll would keep sliding into a net loss. And the games that do have >50% chance options have less than x2 odds so it works out.
Just some bankroll management 101 for casino owners
I also recommend that for brand new casinos, that you manually approve ALL withdrawals exiting your site. That way you have the chance to see if anyone is abusing some exploits before they can make off with your bankroll. Of course, you can gradually automate smaller withdrawals (up to a certain amount) as your systems become more and more secure.
Why don't you just disable the betting buttons in your case though, so you don't have to be on other people's mercy not to play (and use the exploit against you)?
How much is a bit?