Mike from Oz has a webpage about his experiences trying to beat the game of Spacejack. This game supposedly gives the player an expected return of 102%. Mike's webpage can be viewed at
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Mike readily admits he has not collected enough evidence to judge the fairness of the deal.
However his initial experiences have NOT been good:
At first, I only seemed to see
rediculous draws (5 card 21s verses my 20) when I raised my bet; with
Spacejack, you really only have the choice of $1, $5, $10 and up. It
seemed that every bet at $10 (and there were very few) was punished
terribly.
After a while, I was back to $1 bets; without making a deposit, I really
could not afford to keep betting even $5. Now, even $1 bets were
rediculous. The dealer would get at least 3 blackjacks for every one of
mine (the dealer seemed to get them at about normal frequency; aces in
the first two cards for the player seemed much too rare. That was the
conclusion I came to when I first started hand recording cards over a year
ago, but then it seemed it was just a bad patch, and the number was
dragging back towards average.
So here is my conspiracy theory: infrequent play will be rewarded with
better than expected results, as longs as you keep the bets low. This is
presumably to encourage players "just giving it a go" to become long term
players. Then, as soon as you are a regular player, you get much worse
than expected results, probably via the mechanism of dealing fewer aces
to the player for the first two cards. (You still get plenty aces when
doubling 11, however, and my impression is that aces are pretty normal,
or perhaps even enough to compensate for the lack of dealt aces, for third
and later cards).
Perhaps the phrase "bait and switch" (I probably got that wrong) applies
here.
Note: this is not based on anything scientific; I did record about 10 pages
of results a while back, but that's as far as it goes. I was quite discouraged
by that, and stopped playing for a long time. When I came back, it was
great for a while, in line with the conspiracy theory above.
I quickly ran out of what I had deposited, and as James has mentioned,
I've given up. As many people have indicated, if it sounds too good to be
true... The only reason I pursevered with Slotland is that their games are
so different from everyone elses, and they presumably have a huge income
stream from lots of slot players, that perhaps they really could afford the
odd player here and there getting a 102% return. Especially when most
players would be attracted to the jackpot, and attempt to play more than
one hand. But it looks like this one was either rigged from the start, or
was recently changed.
One of the most disturbing things (to me) about this, is how little the
managers genuinely appear to know about their software. If I were
running a casino, the first thing I'd want to know is every little thing about
the software, because it's so critical to my cash flow. Maybe they know
about some clause in the software contract, which causes them to rest
easy without knowing the details...
- Mike from Oz
