Comment by kmnc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmnc | Hacker News Reader

There will be many loopholes and ways to still stream gambling, but the main result of this hopefully is the end of #ad gambling streams which are very dishonest and show a glorified version of gambling (100k bonus buys, 1k per spin) with absolutely no way to know where the money is coming from since it is all crypto. Watching someone spin 1k slots knowing they are making millions from advertising is very different from watching someone spin 5 dollar slots of their own money. The excitement level from a viewer perspective is also way less.

The danger, and likely future however is sites like DraftKings and Fanduel setting up slots and being allowed fully, then sponsoring streamers. Basically, the danger with banning the unregulated stuff yet still being very supportive of gambling (which Twitch and more so Amazon obviously are) is opening a door to further normalization and mainstream acceptance of gambling (see Poker taking a nosedive due to regulation yet paving the way for the massive boom in fantasy sports)... but hey, at least some guy in Curacao won't be getting the millions, some CEO and shareholders in the US will. Still, it is a good step by twitch, and I hope it really does end the #ad gambling streams.

We may see a surge in Fantasy sports betting and e-sports betting though. Having xQC watch NFL games on stream while betting thousands on regulated sites is probably a future Amazon would be very happy with.

> Watching someone spin 1k slots knowing they are making millions from advertising is very different from watching someone spin 5 dollar slots of their own money

It's not just where the money is coming from but whether the odds are different from regular players. The gambling sites who sponsor this can very well adjust the odds per user so that the streamer gets consistent wins where as real players get the real odds which favor the house.

I've seen such gambling "ads" on YouTube, obviously they're not presented as ads nor even as gambling, rather they're presented as a way of making money, a loophole in the game, all the way to saying that there used to be an old version of this game but they closed it down due to many people winning, but this new game also has a loophole (how convenient!). In the "ad", they were consistently winning, in such a way where there's basically no way to lose even if you tried it on purpose. I very much doubt the video was falsified, rather the gambling platform was able to change the odds per-use so that their affiliates can get consistent wins so they can promote the platforms without requiring video trickery.

At least for two of the websites listed by Twitch in the new policy, the websites themselves don’t set the odds. They don’t even make the slot games. A third party creates the games, sets the odds, and provides these websites an API for them to use.

Two of those websites, the ones I’m familiar with, use (at least some of) the same third party websites. For example, Pragmatic Play.

It’s a vastly different conspiracy to say that the websites listed on Twitch’s policy are setting odds in favor of their affiliates when it involves at least two different companies.

That’s not to say this has never happened before, though. There was previously a website called CSGO Shuffle on Twitch that was setting odds in favor of their owners and partners, but those owners and partners also didn’t disclose that they were advertising and didn’t disclose that they were involved in the company.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/21/12246138/twitch-bans-phan...

>At least for two of the websites listed by Twitch in the new policy, the websites themselves don’t set the odds. They don’t even make the slot games. A third party creates the games, sets the odds, and provides these websites an API for them to use.

Not strictly true. Casino operators have access to the game provider tools. Some providers allow you to tweak RTP per game or even per player.

Yes, the Casino operator doesn't make the games, but they don't need to when the game creators expose all this configuration through their tooling and APIs.

Thank you for the correction. Do you know if this is true for the providers commonly used by the websites listed in the new Twitch policy, e.g. Stake?

I think that Stake make their own games. Or at least a company owned by the same people as Stake makes the games.

From https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-secret-australia...

> In 2016, the pair set up Easygo which focused on developing games for online casinos and helped build Stake.com into an online casino powerhouse.

Stake started out at bitcointalk with the socalled original dice games, this then gree into a new era of games usually and still not provided by the classic game play providers. These games are now also available as a nodeJS package for sale.

However, many of their games are from the classic providers.

The only difference on rtp between settings in the new rtp setting for Germany. Even this is not configurable by the operator. No casino can access any rtp settings from game play providers, I work with them every day. Especially on player level sounds absolutely impossible for any reputable provider. I am signing the contracts and implementing the bonus engines etc. It is unheard of in the regulated market.

I would be surprised if this were true, kindly list the providers which do that, I will be happy to eat my words.

NetEnt offers adjustable RTP games. Starburst for example, you can configure it in their back office.

The casinos do not set the odds on the games, the game providers do. You can play the same games across many online casinos, much like how you can play the same slots across many Vegas casinos.

They cannot adjust odds of the slots, that's not how that works. The casinos can cover any losses of slot streamers however.

It sounds like you're talking about real casinos in well regulated jurisdictions. But a big part of the problem is "totally-not-a-casino" casinos which pretend to be something else because most of their clients are children.

Online casinos are, in fact, regulated.

Also why does this "children" thing keep coming up? Casinos don't want children to play their games, they don't even have money to spend!

They might steal the credit card one or two time. And even then the gains are less worth than the hassle from charge backs or possible legal action.

There are casinos aimed at children but instead of playing for money they play for game skins which can be sold for money.

This comments is unfairly downvoted.

I am a head of operations in an online casino. I am responsible for gameplay provider integrations, psp integrations and many things more.

The slots rtp is absolutely set by the game play providers, even the aggregators just pass it on. It is not configurable in any way, not on user level, not on casino operator level, it is always global scope.

The game play providers earn by rev share, they are the top of the food chain and it would be economical suicide to provide different APIs, they have some settings depending on some GEOs, but these are things like no auto play, stake limits etc.

Any regulated casino is using these, the audience is not naive, of course, there are some fly by night operators using pirate games, but this gets detected fast and is often the reason for these casinos having bad rep online, amongst affiliates who will not have them listed etc. These are operated by incompetent people.

Any regulated casino is the key. The “ad” I saw was for a gambling site based in Eastern Europe that actually geo-blocked me as I was in the UK, so I wouldn’t be surprised if regulations there are much more lax if not completely absent.

From a technical perspective, even if we assume that the operator indeed can’t adjust the odds, it would take an engineer only a few hours to mock out the API endpoints the front end calls to return consistent wins and then it’s just a matter of using a browser extension or a proxy to redirect all traffic to the fake server to be able to film such a video (still much easier than faking the video itself).

This sort of chicanery is precisely why I'm of the mind that, while gambling should not be banned (as that just drives it underground) it should be banned from advertising/twitch/etc.

Let people get into destructive behaviours, but for Pete's sake, don't promote the damn thing.

There has been some real loopholes and probably still are. Outside outright bugs the promotional offers with free credit and certain low variance high return slots allowed in certain scenarios for people to make theoretical profit. Though most likely ended up gambling any net wins anyway so...

Yes but that was not it. The game that was demonstrated in this ad was something called “Lucky Jet” or “Aviator” where you bet some money and then there’s a multiplier than goes up starting from 0 - at some point the multiplier will crash and you lose your bet, so your objective is to cash out before that. For the game to be profitable you’d need the multiplier to sometimes crash before 1, but in his video that never happened and he was consistently able to cash out in profit. If these were the real odds the casino would be bankrupt very quickly. Maybe the casino is crooked in a different way and just finds excuses to never let you withdraw your winnings, so they can really give you good odds knowing you’ll never actually be able to withdraw your winnings.

The trickery is not via RTP, it is by other means, which I better not share here, it is a common marketing strategy. Rest assured, there is no tricks with rtp, but the tricks in use are morally not exactly better than that, the industry insiders im high enough positions know. And of course the streamers.

> opening a door to further normalization and mainstream acceptance of gambling

Meh. I don't know that that's resolvable. The fundamental desire for this in the market is real, the job of regulation is just to keep a lid on the worst excesses. Given the choice between a very large regulated market for a good and a somewhat smaller but completely unregulated black market for the same good, most people would prefer the former even if there are sharp edges.

Big-business gambling is no less damaging (or no less "excessive") than small-business gambling. The real difference between big and small is whether the people pocketing the profits tithe a portion of them to political campaigns or not.

Unregulated black markets breed auxiliary crime, they always do.

If you don't have the option to sue people to get back money you're owed, you're forced to resort to less savory options. And on the other side of the incentives calculus, people who defraud and steal from regulated businesses and their customers tend to go to jail. Rip off a fellow criminal and most of the time no one cares.

The solution is legalization and regulation, and to the extent society can't bring itself to do that, it's tantamount to declaring its willingness to tolerate the black market replacement.

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