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I've mentioned this slot before, BTG's Lucky Streak Mk2. I love this slot, the fruit machine theme is done perfectly, BTG have absolutely nailed the aesthetics and the sounds, the way lamps look 'burned in' as used to happen on real fruit machines, it has two features which can both (theoretically.....) pay well, it has a very 'fruit machine' style feature to pick the number of spins in the bonus round - for me, everything about this slot is perfect, and it has a single maths model of a solid 96.32% - EXCEPT - oh my good god the maths model and volatility.

I stuck at this slot for far longer than I should have done, and even on minimum stake spins of 20p, it can fairly chew through a balance. I also happened to have a decent withdrawal from 3Dice of (IIRC) about £800 back to EcoPayz (back when 3Dice still used it), so could deposit to Rizk and play the slot there. (I think it was Rizk anyway, one of the other casinos that took EcoPayz at the time anyway.)

Lucky Streak Mk2 had many hundreds of pounds off me on 20p spins, and it just wouldn't kick back, at all. If you look at the paytable you can see how it's massively skewed towards getting the stacked wilds on 5OAKS in the bonus round, all the other symbols pay pretty crap. (There is no multiplier like on Bonanza.) And I realised that unless I could get the 'dream spin' of hitting those stacked wilds in the very narrow window of opportunity of the bonus round (they're not stacked in the base game), I was never going to get anywhere close to RTP. How many spins was I expected to do to achieve that hit, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions?

In the end I just gave up and walked away, and took the loss, and I haven't played a penny through the game since, as much as I think it's a wonderful slot in so many ways, I just can't be doing with the maths model and volatility, and the fact that achieving RTP really does rely on a 'dream spin' in the bonus round (a bonus round that you can wait a long time for in the first place!).

If I had to have a guess at my RTP on that slot, (and I did a lot of spins on it), I'd guess somewhere around 85% or so, 10%+ off target, and the realisation it could stay like that for a massively extended period of time - it wasn't a commitment of funds I was prepared to make.

The point is of course, that a few extended runs on different slots along the lines of what I had on this game, could easily result in some pretty awful numbers in terms of deposits versus withdrawals.

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I honestly think it's just down to volatility, games are crazy volatile these days, for any of us who were playing online slots back in the days of the Microgaming Viper casino we'll all remember how amazingly gentle a lot of slots were, I used to make deposits of £100 and play something like The Osbournes on £1 spins and you could get away with it. Even the 'spicy' games of the time such as Thunderstruck are a gentle tickle of the knackers compared to the monstrously volatile horrors that are out there today.

As a couple of people have noted above, without knowing how much snorky has wagered relative to his losses it's impossible to say how bad his numbers are, a combination of playing volatile games and a bad run luck wise (but still within expected results), along with a lot of turnover, could lead to the losses seen. Also of course, playing HV games can be ruinous if you don't hit the upside of them, and IMO with a lot of modern HV games you're drifting into lottery territory for hitting the big stuff, and without that you're just going to be burning money against a load of RTP you'll never realise. (For example as much as I piss and moan about BTG, I'm in lifetime profit with them as a provider thanks to that otherwordly spawn I had on The Final Countdown when I hit a 5698x feature after 24 spins on my first ever session playing the game with real funds - £2,279 from a 40p spin. I suspect the odds on that result are in the long millions to one.)

Also a lot of slots we used to play have simply disappeared, NetEnt for example retire their slots quite aggressively, going back seven or eight years they had loads of sensible volatility games on their books, but it's literally impossible to play them these days, they don't exist.

I still check in at Unibet on a regular basis to look at the new slots that have been released, but I play them in demo mode, not with real funds. The number of games that can slice through 500x stake or more without much of a return is absolutely shocking, the idea that I'd even remotely want to chuck real money at these abominations is pure fantasy.

Ultimately all we can do is vote with our wallets, I don't like HV games at all, so I don't play them, and that fixes it.

Just to add that casinos would much more prefer a low volatile game. This even more so now than before due to regulators imposing more strict deposit limits, RG considerations etc.

To me it sounds like the best game would be the one that at every spin pays out 95% of the bet on a RTP95% slot. No one would then ever say that everything is rigged or...........? ;)
 
Just to add that casinos would much more prefer a low volatile game. This even more so now than before due to regulators imposing more strict deposit limits, RG considerations etc.

To me it sounds like the best game would be the one that at every spin pays out 95% of the bet on a RTP95% slot. No one would then ever say that everything is rigged or...........? ;)
This is a very good point. A lot of casinos these days won't take slots that can pay large prizes, not necessarily because they cannot handle the exposure of a big win, but more because players tend to walk and cash out when they hit a 1000x win or greater. Online casinos like these wins to be rare so less money leaves the site. They love games that dish out wins of 1-300x at most, as these just get recycled until they're gone.

People saying they are getting fewer withdrawals than they used to are playing more slots on 94-95% RTP and therefore probably need to lower their target withdrawal values accordingly.

In the end we'll probably get lumbered with slots that pay 92% RTP, with a bonus hit-rate of 1/35 that pays 150x at the very best. Everyone can recycle their money away and the site probably won't even need a withdrawal button.
 
I can’t agree with that. If this was the case, then why would the majority of providers be moving away from low variance games.

Low variance players taking all night to lose £50, with the unlikelihood of a withdrawal or high variance players losing £2,000 a night with the slim possibility of hitting a 10k win? Even when that happens, it will be more than covered by other players, playing at high stakes.
 
I can’t agree with that. If this was the case, then why would the majority of providers be moving away from low variance games.

Low variance players taking all night to lose £50, with the unlikelihood of a withdrawal or high variance players losing £2,000 a night with the slim possibility of hitting a 10k win? Even when that happens, it will be more than covered by other players, playing at high stakes.

Yes I'd agree with you on that one snorky, the evidence of our eyes tells us that HV games are raking in the dollars, and new LV or even MV games are basically a thing of the past.

I've asked both NLC and 4ThePlayer here on CM if they'd be releasing games that aren't so crazy HV at some point, and both of them said words to the effect of, 'Well, never say never I suppose' (or in other words, 'No').

Early on in Covid I did a video for my old channel, the idea was to find a decent selection of LV-MV games that could deliver decent playtime from relatively small bankrolls, with the chance to win a few quid, the idea being that during lockdown people might be playing slots more to pass the time but wouldn't want to lose a fortune.

I did succeed in the task, but last night I went through the list of slots I identified and now, two and a bit years later, nearly every single one has either disappeared completely or has had its RTP reduced.

I completely understand that three games all set to 96%, with LV - MV - HV maths models will all settle down to exactly the same profit for the casino when aggregated across all players over enough time, but on an individual level they can drain balances quicker (especially when feature buys are lobbed into the mix). With the way casinos work now, essentially just acting as a 'shop window' for a load of different providers, with new slots being churned through on a nearly daily basis, the 'window of opportunity' for a slot to take a player's money is limited.

Take an LV slot that churns gently through at around its 95% RTP, that isn't going to make much money, whereas a HV slot that needs a 'dream hit' to get close to its RTP (for example Lucky Streak Mk2 I mentioned above), well, which is the provider and the casino going to prefer, which is going to make the most money?

There has to be a reason that HV slots have proliferated in the way they have, and this is an 'industry' (I use the word advisedly since I think of industry as an entity that actually makes something useful) that is driven entirely by money, so this has to be where the money is at.
 
As far as I can see - you played the same amount of money in 18 months as you did in the 6 years prior (or 4.5 years if they overlapped), and lost more money. And that seems entirely logical to me; games are much higher variance now, so you're gonna lose quicker, even if you're not playing the lowered RTP versions of them.

And BTG? Ludicrously high variance. Of course you're gonna lose quicker. The big hits are still there, but you'll have to fight for them. And as others have suggested, a lot of the time, the bigger hits are landing in the base game; if you're chasing bonuses, you're not necessarily going to win bigger.

Short answer: if you're not having fun with them, stop playing. And if you think Videoslots are running some sort of scam, I'm not sure how they could, but if they can, and you can prove that they did, they'll be in for a hefty fine and you'll be something of a hero.
 
As far as I can see - you played the same amount of money in 18 months as you did in the 6 years prior (or 4.5 years if they overlapped), and lost more money. And that seems entirely logical to me;
Really? As stated, the games I play haven’t changed much at all, since day 1. The BTG games I play are not (or should I say, they didn’t used to be) HV.

I am not sure where the myth that Chilli, DHV and in particular, Bonanza, are HV slots.

HV slots are games like DOA, where you can get 100’s of bonuses that pay nothing and then get one that pays x20,000.

Bonanza was medium variance at best. It regularly delivered hits from x100-x1,000. That’s not HV.

Admittedly, it now plays like a super HV slot. The only difference being, is that it produces 100’s of bonuses that pay nothing but never delivers a monster win either. Apart from a handful of bonuses, between x1,000 and x5,000 it’s done nothing amazing in 6 years.
 
The thing is snorky I don't even think your VS numbers are that bad, yes you've had an extended bad run recently but considering how much gameplay you've done there, playing random games with a house edge of 4% or greater, you're going to lose a chunk of cash cash over time - and the more you play, the more you're going to lose.

I bet if you asked them to pull your lifetime stats for you, you'd be very close to T-RTP once aggregated across all games, so all that's really left to complain about is you don't like the maths models and/or volatility profiles of the games. (As I documented above with Lucky Streak Mk2.)

Yes I know you're convinced Bonanza has been changed but you were running hot on it whilst everyone else was running cold for quite a period of time. Moreover, lord only knows how the maths works on these BTG games, I know you think you've done loads and loads and loads of spins on it, and for a single player you probably have, but compared with the spins they'll have put through that thing in testing, it'll be a drop in the ocean.

I don't think for one second that VS specifically can 'cheat' you, that they can influence the games, that they turn on a compensation switch or anything like that, they just take the games as they come from the providers (on crappy RTPs if they can), and lob random results at you, safe in the knowledge that the inbuilt 4-8% house edge will do the rest.

Losing 50 straight deposits on the bounce sounds really bad, but you say yourself they were only £15 each, which adds up to £750, that's probably about what I spunked in Lucky Streak Mk2 in total on 20p spins without ever hitting a single sizeable win, but I didn't call foul or cheating, I just took it on the chin and walked away, I took on a HV slot, and the HV slot won :)
 
They don’t look that bad, though we don’t know how close to the RTP you are. But basically you’ve withdrawn 80% of the amount you’ve deposited, and presumably didn’t withdraw every win.

And Bonanza IS high variance. Most BTG slots are.

What are you suggesting the problem is? That you are losing in a way that isn’t fair? If so, how?
 
Point being, as I have said god knows how many times. I WASN’T PLAYING HV GAMES.

You don’t think my figures are that bad! I give up.

DHV is a highly volatile game,, very much so (I mean, there's a clue in the name). Bonanza and Chilli have a unique sort of 'BTG variance' which we've already discussed over in the Bonanza thread, and dunover in particular described very well the impressively pernicious maths model that BTG have managed to create.

I say again snorky, in fact I'd put money on it, that if you asked VS for your lifetime RTP stats, you'd be +/- less than 1% from T-RTP when aggregated across all games.
 
They don’t look that bad, though we don’t know how close to the RTP you are. But basically you’ve withdrawn 80% of the amount you’ve deposited, and presumably didn’t withdraw every win.

And Bonanza IS high variance. Most BTG slots are.

What are you suggesting the problem is? That you are losing in a way that isn’t fair? If so, how?
Okay, just strip it to the bare bones.

In the first 6 years, I deposit roughly 24k of which I lose roughly 3k.

In the next 18 months I deposit roughly 23k and lose, roughly 6.5k. Playing pretty much THE SAME GAMES, THAT ALLEGEDLY, HAVE NOT CHANGED THE RTP.

Does that not strike you as being, at the very least, questionable?
 
DHV is a highly volatile game,, very much so (I mean, there's a clue in the name). Bonanza and Chilli have a unique sort of 'BTG variance' which we've already discussed over in the Bonanza thread, and dunover in particular described very well the impressively pernicious maths model that BTG have managed to create.

I say again snorky, in fact I'd put money on it, that if you asked VS for your lifetime RTP stats, you'd be +/- less than 1% from T-RTP when aggregated across all games.
That’s another thing that I find, more than questionable.

You’re quite right, when I have asked most Casinos for my lifetime rtp, they always come back with 93-96%. Apart from a couple, where I am as low as 85% (sites where I have virtually played nothing other than Bonanza).

I find this extremely convenient, for want of a better word. When you have played quite a few games over the years and have (and this is a real example) such a range of possible rtp on each game, that your average is always around, what it should be.

In the example, I have my lowest rtp in a game at 1%. My highest rtp in a game is 666% and despite having played various games over the years, amazingly my rtp is exactly where it should be. Asking others and they all say pretty much, their rtp is where it should be.

This just defies the laws of probability and I will explain why.

Let’s take a hypothetical situation, whereby we select 10 players. We give them £100 per day, to play in a B+M Casino for 5 years solid. They can choose any games they like and for argument’s sake all the games have a 96% rtp.

Here is my question (that requires a non politician type answer). By that I mean a simple Yes or No, unless you have a valid point.

The experiment has been set up to track each players rtp.

At the end of the 5 years, do you think all 10 players would be running very close to the 96% rtp?
 
Yeah but how much did you stake from that 24k of deposits? If you staked 200k and ended up 3k down, your all-time RTP% across all of those games is 98.5%, which is pretty decent - you've still lost money but not at the rate you should have if the combined RTP of the games played is 96.5% for example.

Then you deposited 23k and lost 6.5k. One would assume you staked more than 23k to lose that amount. Let's say you only staked 150k this time and had 143.5k back - that's a return of 95.66%, slightly below expectation if using the previous example.

Cumulatively you've put 350k in for 340.5k out, so you've lost 9.5k. But your overall RTP% is 97.29 - which is still pretty decent.

There are two things you can draw from this -
  • Your expectations are too high
  • Looking at deposit vs withdrawals instead of total staked vs total winnings will always look unfavourable and give rise to conspiracy theories.
Again, this might have already been mentioned by the likes of ReelsofFun or Chopley and so on, and if so, apologies.
 
Let’s take a hypothetical situation, whereby we select 10 players. We give them £100 per day, to play in a B+M Casino for 5 years solid. They can choose any games they like and for argument’s sake all the games have a 96% rtp.

Here is my question (that requires a non politician type answer). By that I mean a simple Yes or No, unless you have a valid point.

The experiment has been set up to track each players rtp.

At the end of the 5 years, do you think all 10 players would be running very close to the 96% rtp?

Absolutely, yes.

Each player will have deposited a total of £185,000, allowing for a relatively normal churn on, let's say, £1 spins, each of them will have wagered millions and millions of pounds, across millions and millions of spins, so yes, I'd expect them all to be very close to T-RTP and all of them to have lost a few thousands pounds in the process.

Once your sample size gets large enough, you effectively hit perfect RTP. So a £1 spin at 96% ultimately returns 96p, and costs the player 4p - you can work out the rest from there.

If we really bring it down to the maths then playing random games with a house edge is quite stupid, because it is mathematically guaranteed that over time we will lose, but we all know that already, and it doesn't stop us chasing those big hits :) I'm still chasing a five scatters trigger on Berrini's Fortune at 3Dice, one of these days I'll (hopefully!) hit one of their progressives, maybe one day I'll get perfect picks on Enchanted Spins in a bonus round, or hit five wilds in a free spins round with a big multiplier in Arctic Adventure - and when any of those things happens it will not even remotely repair my lifetime losses there, but I feel like I've had a fair game and been entertained along the way, and I'm fine with that, which is why I still play there.

VS however, with their gimped RTPs and nerfed bonuses/rewards/boosters/wheels etc, as as well crazy HV games from providers taking over the place, led me to make the decision to walk away - I didn't feel like they were giving me a reason to play there anymore, so I stopped doing it. They made a chunk of money out of me whilst I was an active player there, no hard feelings on my part.
 
A few thousand? I think some would have lost a lot more than that. Way, way more to be honest.

Well it depends how many spins they do per day, and how they play with their £100. If they play every £100 down to a bust, then they'll all lose £185K over five years.

At the other end let's say they all do 100 spins at £1 per day, you can't bust out a £100 bankroll from that so if we say each spin will, on average, cost them 4p, they'll each lose £4 per day - multiply that by five years and they've all lost £7,300. (Their spin sample size on that won't be particularly large though, so I'd expect some decent sized variances between their results at the end of five years, depending on the volatility of the games they were playing. If they were all playing Starburst then they'd probably all be pretty close.....)
 
You’re quite right, when I have asked most Casinos for my lifetime rtp, they always come back with 93-96%. Apart from a couple, where I am as low as 85% (sites where I have virtually played nothing other than Bonanza).

I find this extremely convenient, for want of a better word. When you have played quite a few games over the years and have (and this is a real example) such a range of possible rtp on each game, that your average is always around, what it should be.

In the example, I have my lowest rtp in a game at 1%. My highest rtp in a game is 666% and despite having played various games over the years, amazingly my rtp is exactly where it should be. Asking others and they all say pretty much, their rtp is where it should be.

This just defies the laws of probability and I will explain why.

But this is literally what the laws of probability are and how they work, or specifically the law of large numbers.

Flip a coin 100 times, you're going to be very close to 50/50 for heads and tails, because there are only two possible outcomes so the law of large numbers kicks in very quickly.

An online slot is kind of just an incredibly complex coin flip, with billions and billions of possible outcomes, but eventually, the laws of probability will do their thing and you'll average out to expected results.

In the case of online slots, this means that every time you press the spin button, you will, on average, over enough time, lose 4% of your stake on a 96% slot.

Where you've got a 1% RTP and a 666% RTP then clearly your spin sample is very small and not statistically significant, it'd be like flipping a coin three times, getting three heads, and then deciding the coin is rigged because it never lands on tails.
 
snorky you’ll never convince the ones who believe everything is above board. just know that there’s the ones on here who are in the same mind frame as you and who know it’s a smash and grab theft in the uk at the minute and some fat envelopes have exchanged hands

Your evidence is extremely compelling, I'm convinced.

What with snorky's dossier demonstrating that over an extended period of time he lost money playing random games with a generous house edge, this could be the next Watergate.
 
There certainly are a lot of experts on here but one thing is fact - none of us really, truly know what happens behind the scenes.

@snorky510238 - I feel for you mate. It’s not a nice feeling when you feel you are being duped. I’ve only been playing online slots for the past two years and I agree that the older slots I used to play when I started do play noticeably different today, and my bankroll doesn’t last as long as it used to (and I’m very sensitive to RTP changes).

I must admit I’ve had brief thoughts like you have. My play pretty much exclusively goes to the two remaining UK outfits that offer max RTP across their catalogues. MrQ and Bet365. I do well on Bet365 but find it difficult to win on MrQ. I’ve wondered if MrQ have inaccurate RTP info on their slots but have put it down to a poor run of luck.

It seems likely that the providers tinker around with the way slots play, especially if a new release is a bit too loose at the start. This is probably perpetuated by streamers who hammer new releases on high bets which may give the illusion that they are too loose and tweak things within RTP (alter hit rates etc). This is not relevant in your case as you say you mainly consistently play older slots. But I also feel that providers have been tweaking older games too as I can see with my own eyes and wallet that they are not quite the same.

I would say from a logical point of view that all a “reputable” online casino can do to dupe you is to say a slot is at one RTP while the game is actually set lower. Given Videoslots have taken to gimping every slot they can (meaning they have requested lower RTP versions), I would doubt they are doing this. But I’ve not played at VS since they went on a gimpage and refuse to do so. They’ll be hurting without my £50 per week deposit…

Like I said, I feel for you mate. Maybe it’s time to take a short breather from slots. That’s what I do when I feel my play is on a downturn.
 
Why play slots in the first place if worried about being duped? You're only going to lose on slots in the long run. It's guaranteed. We're all suckers in the end showing thousands into online casinos.

So now you finally figured out it's all rigged against you? Well fuck me senseless.
 
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