Casino wants to know my salary

[nonif]

Markus, if I may, what kind of game do you usually play ?

 

[Markus]

Markus, if I may, what kind of game do you usually play ?

Nothing unusual, mostly Blackjack, Roulette and Slots.

 

[Jasminebed]

Blackjack, roulette and slots all have house edges. You complied with their request for info, and if what you told us is true, $800 plus in a month is not a huge amount to deposit, assuming that sometimes you win and withdraw. If it was asked to KYC, you've satisfied that.

Must agree with Jod that it looks like you were kicked to the curb for being lucky.

Short-sighted on the part of the Casino, since you now have $6K of their funds you'll never play back there.

 

[Jufo]

If it is any consolation to you Markus, what they did was probably in your favour anyway. Now they can never win the money back from you. Had you continued to play there without bonuses, the most probable result would have been that you would have lost some of the winnings back. It's less likely that you would have kept winning on top of what you already did. So with that I would just move on, shaking my head how silly they are.

 

[vinylweatherman]

This is bullshit. It is clear from the start that this was about closing down this player. They should have just done that. Instead, they asked for intrusive information about salary and employer with there never having been any other outcome other than closing the account.

Since the OP didn't use bonuses, this has nothing to do with the risk of "bonus abuse" originating from Germany. If anything, it seems related to the recent banning by Genting casino of a raft of countries, including Germany, because of "changes in the legal environment".

I suspect a number of German players will have their accounts closed.

It seems to me that they concocted this asking for salary ruse to avoid blatantly shutting accounts of persistent winners, with the attendant "laughter" from those intelligent enough to know that where no bonuses are involved, there is NO risk whatsoever that such persistent winning is anything other than a run of luck, which WILL reverse over the long term. All they have done is ensure that other players who win big will have second thoughts about playing again and losing it back, knowing that they will probably have their accounts closed at some point just for winning.

Since the OP was in employment, the KYC excuse and prevention of "problem gambling beyond means" is also total BS.

They are being evasive about the reasons for closing the account because it has NOTHING to do with the OPs salary or employment, and don't want the real reason stated "on the record" as it could damage the confidence of other players who are currently having a run of luck, and who may leave rather than play it back if they knew that overall profit of the order of 6K is enough to be thrown out.


Given that Playtech share data between it's licensees*, it is possible that the statement "there are other good Playtechs to try" may not necessarily be the case, as whatever reason the accounts were closed could influence other Playtech operators to block the OP before he even starts playing again.

* this was discovered in the Grand Duke issue, where a player was blocked because of their activities at "other Playtech casinos", ones that had nothing to do with Grand Duke, which had only been operating for 3 months at the time, and had no internal data on the player concerned.

 

[dealer wins]

Come on OP, share your winning secret with us

No one can beat roulette, slots and BJ time after time without an edge!!!

 

[Markus]

It is true that I did some advantage play without bonus. But I also played quite a lot games with house edge so I did gave them chances to win money back.

Anyway, if the advantage play was really the reason to close my account then I wonder why they didn't just told me the truth, i.e. that they don't like my gameplay? Of course I would have accepted this. Asking about salary and employer to create an excuse for closing a player account is very questionable. So if my advantage play was the reason then Totesport behaved very disappointing.

 

[vinylweatherman]

It is true that I did some advantage play without bonus. But I also played quite a lot games with house edge so I did gave them chances to win money back.

Anyway, if the advantage play was really the reason to close my account then I wonder why they didn't just told me the truth, i.e. that they don't like my gameplay? Of course I would have accepted this. Asking about salary and employer to create an excuse for closing a player account is very questionable. So if my advantage play was the reason then Totesport behaved very disappointing.

No such thing.

You may have had a strategy, but you would NOT remove the house edge this way. It seems that this operator believes that your system actually WORKS based on your past performance of winning around 6K. It was just luck, you just didn't suffer the big downturn that always brings such "systems" to an end. Had they let you carry on, this would have eventually happened, and the 6K would be back in their hands. If your system DID work, then it is because the games were NOT RANDOM! (and you took advantage of a pattern/bias in order to cause a long term +EV outcome).

ALL the games have a house edge, it is just that with a few it is wafer thin. Even in a so called "zero lounge" you cannot beat the house long term, as every mistake gives the house some money, and you can never get it back mathematically in the long term.

It is worrying because they may apply such flawed logic when it comes to assessing "bonus abuse" situations with players who can take bonuses.

If you have a system, SELL it now that you have been banned (and can't use it yourself), and use the fact that you had Betfred/Totesport running for cover over it as a marketing tool. You might have trouble though, as most of us realise it won't work in the long term, whatever Betfred believe.

 

[Markus]

No such thing.

I'm surprised that you are saying now that there is no advantage play without bonus after you have wrote this post where you correctly summarised the ways of advantage play.

I can do the math, really. I do know whenever there is a player edge or a house edge.

 

[vinylweatherman]

I'm surprised that you are saying now that there is no advantage play without bonus after you have wrote this post where you correctly summarised the ways of advantage play.

I can do the math, really. I do know whenever there is a player edge or a house edge.

A bugged game in Playtech

My post mainly referred to casinos getting the maths wrong in promotions. With no bonuses, even the tiniest house edge will get you in the long term. I have not been aware that Playtech offered any games with an RTP of slightly over 100%.

Even the best of the Blackjack games has a tiny edge in favour of the casino, even though it is a fraction of one percent. The commonest mathematical advantage play used to take place on such Blackjack games where the WR was set too low such that grinding it out on minimum bets lead to a long term +EV situation such that the expected loss was less than the amount of bonus money gained. This never applied to Playtech since it had phantom bonuses, as do most RTG casinos.

If Playtech have screwed up the maths on one of their games, it is equally vulnerable at ANY Playtech casino. If this is what Betfred have realised, WTF is all this bullshit about asking you about salary and name of employer. They would have shut your account whatever you earned, so they were asking for personal information which was not necessary - in other words, they broke the Data Protection laws. These laws stipulate that a private company can only REQUIRE that customers give them personal information that is necessary for the conduct of their relationship with the customer, they may not "require" more information just because they want it. The provision is there to stop businesses going on "fishing expeditions" for additional data for use other than providing the service they are contracted to supply. Salary and name of employer is personal data, and can ONLY be required if it has a bearing on the service they are providing. Since they had already decided you were "cheating" due to a mathematical vulnerabilty in one or more of the games, they had no need to know your salary and employer details given that the decision had already been made to close your account.

It is clear that Simmo's theory of them just "going through the motions" in order to cover themselves if they get audited was wrong. They were trying to construct a reason to close your account without having to admit you had found a way to consistently beat the base games even without any bonuses.

The proper way to deal with this would be to alter the paytable of the offending game such that the house, not the player, had the edge. A minor adjustment would not materially affect most other players, but it would stop the experienced and disciplined player from slowly getting ahead simply by playing perfect strategy.

The miscalculation has to be pretty striking for you to have turned a string of €20 deposit into a few withdrawals totalling €6K. This does not look like the usual scenario of a game with an RTP marginally above 100% that becomes less than 100% if the player makes even a single mistake.


The Wizard of Odds has a list of all the games from the major softwares, and other than slots, he gives the mathematical RTP as well as the RTP that can be achieved where a game provides for player interaction after making the initial stake, often referred to as "degree of risk".

If there is a mathematically vulnerable game in Playtech, it will be there, along with a strategy card to beat it.

Maybe you can get ahead by a similar amount at other casinos by using the same strategy before they too close your account. THEN you can sell it

 

[Nifty29]

He's talking about system or strategy play Vinyl.

You can't advantage play a game with a house edge without a bonus....unless you exploit a game malfunction, in which case its cheating not advantage play.

 

[Markus]

He's talking about system or strategy play Vinyl.

You can't advantage play a game with a house edge without a bonus....unless you exploit a game malfunction, in which case its cheating not advantage play.

No I'm not talking about system or strategy play. I'm talking about playing a game with a player edge. Of course this player edge is not very obvious and a little bit more complicated, otherwise someone else would have found it much earlier. But it is not a game malfunction, because the game behaves in exact the same way the programmers intended it. It is a design misconcept which results in a player edge in certain circumstances. So I didn't cheated at all, I just did some advantage play.

 

[vinylweatherman]

No I'm not talking about system or strategy play. I'm talking about playing a game with a player edge. Of course this player edge is not very obvious and a little bit more complicated, otherwise someone else would have found it much earlier. But it is not a game malfunction, because the game behaves in exact the same way the programmers intended it. It is a design misconcept which results in a player edge in certain circumstances. So I didn't cheated at all, I just did some advantage play.

I did some research on the Wizard of Odds, and suspected Blackjack Switch to be the culprit, however the maths didn't stack up. Even with comps taken into account, the house still has a wafer thin edge. If the game CAN be beaten, then the WIZARD has got his maths wrong in his "perfect strategy" calculations.

However, it now seems that Playtech have begun removing this game, so it looks like this IS the game in question, and it must have been programmed with a slight variation to the intended rules that leads to this player edge.

This also proves that all this asking about salary and occupation was BULLSHIT from the start. Playtech had just found out what was going on with this game, and operators were getting rid of players who had been clever enough to spot it in case they were clever enough to exploit something else.

Since this was a rule error in a game, or at least an implementation error, Playtech didn't want this known, so operators needed to concoct excuses to get rid of players, and dared not void winnings in case the players went to adjudication which would force the operator to "come clean".

Unfortunately, mass removal of the offending game tells all, as it did back in 2006 when Microgaming had a similar +EV situation misprogramed into two of it's "classic" 3 reel slots. Operators concocted excuses to void winnings them and were even prepared to be thrown in the rogue pit rather than admit to Bryan the REAL reason they were voiding winnings. In the end they paid up to stay out of the pit, refusing to say any more than it being "illegitimate play that was not fraud", even though in many cases NO bonuses had been involved. The subsequent mass removal of the game most vulnerable to the exploit indicated what was REALLY going on, which turned out to be a new account initialisation error that meant the first session on the game was more or less guaranteed to be highly +EV.

I believe RTG once offered a Deuces Wild VP game on "full pay" which was slightly +EV, and took it down once too many players had learned the correct strategy.