Playing with an Edge in Casino Tournaments: $1,800,000 in 14 Months
When knowledge of probability and basic math transforms gambling into advantage play.
The Million-Dollar Email
My life literally split into two parts: before October 1, 2020, and after. That Thursday evening, I received an email that kicked off an incredible adventure that continues to this day. It was a notification about a Slot Race with a prize pool of $1,000,000.
I never believed you could actually win anything significant in casino tournaments. Usually, high rollers who play with large bets take the prize positions but end up losing more than they win in prizes. But here, the prize pool was a whole million dollars, and even 10th place offered a solid $14,000 prize. I thought this might be interesting and set it aside until the weekend.
A Fortunate Discovery
Sunday evening, more out of boredom than anything else, I decided to dig into the tournament details. Surprisingly, this tournament wasn't being discussed anywhere online—information was only available on the casino's website. I reviewed the rules:
Winning criterion: maximum multiplier (win coefficient relative to bet). Specifically, the sum of all multipliers after 100 spins.
Unlimited attempts—only your best result counts.
Minimum bet to play—one dollar.
To win, you needed just one lucky spin, and you didn't need to make thousands of max bets to win the top prize. This gave me hope for positive expected value. At the top of the leaderboard was a 7800x win. I had no idea if that was a lot or a little, or how difficult it would be to match.
It's not hard to figure out that knowing the RTP (Return to Player percentage) and the frequency of hitting a 7800x multiplier, you could calculate how much money you'd need to spend to get such a multiplier, then compare it to the $100,000 first prize. My intuition told me the game was worth playing. I just needed to calculate what was truly worth pursuing.
I already had some casino experience, mainly with bonuses, but I'd never hit even a 1000x multiplier. I needed to find information that wasn't available anywhere.
How Often Do Big Wins Happen?
I got lucky twice. First, when the email didn't go to spam. Second, when I remembered seeing a detailed mathematical analysis of several NetEnt slots by someone with a mathematical background in an online gambling discussion.
I found these analyses, and one of the slots was Dead or Alive 2 (DoA 2). This mathematician had somehow decoded the game's algorithm: identified which symbols appeared on the reels, their payouts, created a computer model of the slot, and ran tens of millions of virtual spins to verify the RTP and learn the frequency of large wins.
His conclusions were as follows:
The RTP indeed matched what was advertised, and the demo version was no different from the original.
Getting a 111,000x multiplier requires about 45 million spins on average.
For a 10,000x multiplier—approximately 276,000 spins.
For a 5,000x multiplier—approximately 115,000 spins.
Calculating the Odds of Winning
Now I could make exact calculations. The minimum bet for the tournament was $1, but the slot itself only offered bets of $0.9 and $1.8, so we'd have to play at $1.8.
Here's a simple calculation formula: Number of spins × bet amount × (1-RTP) = expected cost
Where:
Number of spins = average attempts needed to hit the desired multiplier
Bet amount = minimum bet to play
RTP = return to player (0.9662)
114,297 × 1.8 × (1-0.9662) = $8,229 (for a 5000x multiplier)
276,616 × 1.8 × (1-0.9662) = $19,924 (for a 10000x multiplier)
Conclusion: We'd need to lose $20,000 on average to win the $100,000 first place prize, or lose $8,000 to win the $75,000 second place prize.
But we needed to make hundreds of thousands of spins. The tournament lasted only one week, and we had already missed the start.
From Theory to Practice
It felt too good to pass up. I called my friend Arthur — he hadn’t been doing so well lately. He’d been deep into card counting in blackjack, but for some reason, the losses kept piling up. He hadn’t left the house in weeks.
"Hey, I've got a million-dollar proposition, seriously, listen," Arthur listened carefully and became interested. "Show me these calculations and the posts you found," he requested.
A couple of minutes later, he called back: "Yeah, this looks legit, feels like a professor wrote a dissertation. I'll be home in an hour, ready to start, 50-50?" "Of course," I agreed.
When life deals you 11, double down and take the bull by the horns. This was one of those moments.
However, there was one factor we hadn't fully accounted for: variance. We knew that achieving the desired result required an enormous number of spins, but we didn't realize how quickly money could evaporate. Many players know that DoA 2's High Noon Saloon bonus game can eat through your bankroll at a terrifying speed. We were about to find this out.
Tournament #1: Risk and Triumph
The initial results were disheartening. Overnight, between the two of us, we lost about $20,000 without hitting a single significant win. By Monday evening, our losses had reached $45,000.
Arthur was falling into despair: "Where's your damn magical multiplier?! I'm about to lose everything!" I felt the weight of responsibility—after all, I had proposed this venture.
Key insight: When mathematics is on your side, you just need to keep your cool and continue working. Variance can be brutal in the short term, and you need to hope your bankroll is enough to survive it.
Monday night to Tuesday morning, I couldn't sleep. Every 30 minutes, I'd wake up checking the results. My laptop sat next to my bed, the auto-clicker tirelessly pressing the spin button and selecting the right bonus game. By morning, our combined losses had reached $60,000. The situation seemed critical, but there was no turning back.
Suddenly, things changed. A message from Arthur. I read it, not believing my eyes: "I just hit a 10,000x!!! First place is ours, it all works!!!"
It was a moment of euphoria—$100,000 for first place plus the win itself of over $18,000. That same day, I also got a remarkable result—a 5500x multiplier, securing us third place with a $50,000 prize.
Now there was no doubt—our mathematical model worked! Emboldened by success, I suggested bringing in two more friends while there was still time before the tournament ended. And then our greatest stroke of luck occurred—our friend, who started playing only on the last day of the race, hit a 13,346x multiplier that very same day!
Epilogue: The Path to Millions
If you enjoyed this story, or if you're interested in learning more details, let me know in the comments. I'll share the complete journey to $1,800,000, including how we faced fierce competition, sudden rule changes, problems with casino security, and how we became "probability wizards" of sorts, calculating multiplier probabilities using the Monte Carlo method.
Some of our results were discussed on major forums as complete scams—people simply couldn't believe such wins were possible. Sometimes we found clever ways to get multipliers without making hundreds of thousands of spins by using game mechanic nuances, sometimes we knew where to get them faster.
Some of my friends consider this story incredible luck, others believe the success was completely justified. What do you think?