Can I be an AP with a 12% rebate on online gambling

Hi all, I recently came across a gambling promo on a website and was wondering if I can ever work the promo to my advantage. I'm not entirely sure how I should approach to calculate the house edge based on this promo. Seeking help and input, and the best approach to exploit this promo.

Details:
12% rebate on all losses in sports betting or online gaming.
Max bet on online gaming (baccarat) is $2000.
Min bet is $10.
Max bet on sports betting is $5000.
Min bet is $25.
I can only take the rebates at the end of a 7 day period.
This promo goes on indefinitely.

Initial thoughts:
I should max bet on a game that has the lowest house edge - baccarat.
If I win, I'll take the win of $2k and walk away and wait for the next 7 day period.
If I lose, I'll take the loss and rebate of $240 and walk away and wait for the next 7 day period.
Given that the banker house edge is 1.06%, I should be winning against this house edge with this strategy.

Questions:
Am I on the right track in exploiting this promo?
Are there ways to better optimize my win-rate i.e do not stop at 1 win or 1 loss but keep going until I reach 3 wins or losses (3 is arbitrary).
Is max-betting the correct strategy?
How do I calculate the volatility of this strategy.

Cheers all.

Quote: Rburg88

Hi all, I recently came across a gambling promo on a website and was wondering if I can ever work the promo to my advantage. I'm not entirely sure how I should approach to calculate the house edge based on this promo. Seeking help and input, and the best approach to exploit this promo.

Details:
12% rebate on all losses in sports betting or online gaming.
Max bet on online gaming (baccarat) is $2000.
Min bet is $10.
Max bet on sports betting is $5000.
Min bet is $25.
I can only take the rebates at the end of a 7 day period.
This promo goes on indefinitely.

Initial thoughts:
I should max bet on a game that has the lowest house edge - baccarat.
If I win, I'll take the win of $2k and walk away and wait for the next 7 day period.
If I lose, I'll take the loss and rebate of $240 and walk away and wait for the next 7 day period.
Given that the banker house edge is 1.06%, I should be winning against this house edge with this strategy.

Questions:
Am I on the right track in exploiting this promo?
Are there ways to better optimize my win-rate i.e do not stop at 1 win or 1 loss but keep going until I reach 3 wins or losses (3 is arbitrary).
Is max-betting the correct strategy?
How do I calculate the volatility of this strategy.

Cheers all.
link to original post

What makes you think you will actually get paid? I wouldn’t be surprised if you are charged with ‘bonus abuse’ if you win the single bet and try and cash out, or if you just make a single max bet per week and lose that bet!

As far as the math goes, you definitely have an advantage with one single max bet per week. There are lots of threads here that address how to optimize a loss rebate.

I have no way of knowing whether I'll be charged with abuse. In fact, I have no way of knowing whether they will pay me as well.

Posting the question as an academic exercise as well.

Quote: Rburg88

I have no way of knowing whether I'll be charged with abuse. In fact, I have no way of knowing whether they will pay me as well.

Posting the question as an academic exercise as well.
link to original post

You started this thread with ‘Can I be an AP’….. To answer YOUR question you have to figure in the chances of it being paid if you win.

For purely an academic exercise I hope you get your answer. The exact best way to handle it to maximize EV is above my math skills. It’s clearly +EV at the single bet per week plan.

Quote: Rburg88

I have no way of knowing whether I'll be charged with abuse. In fact, I have no way of knowing whether they will pay me as well.

Posting the question as an academic exercise as well.
link to original post

Will you be a new user at this site or do you have a history there? You should try to establish yourself as a good customer first. You should make several modest deposits taking advantage of deposit bonuses to build up your bankroll. You should also make several small withdrawals to be sure you can get paid out smoothly. The casino will usually look very hard at the first withdrawal, especially if it is large.

Investigations for bonus abuse take time and cost the casino money. If you start small and ramp up, you can boil the frog. There is never a day when they say 'today is the day we have to take action against this customer'. If they do investigate and decide to take no action, they may decide it is a waste of time to reopen an investigation later.

I would recommend playing slots at first. If things go smoothly with the loss rebate, then consider baccarat or craps. Embed your large bets in the middle of a session of small slot bets. This only costs you a tiny amount of EV for the promo and makes it harder for the casino to spot the big bets in the log.

If you have an edge, don't get greedy and get in their face. Really blatant abusers hurt everyone because promo managers get called to account for a promo that can be easily abused. Promo managers are capable of learning from their mistakes, so don't make it obvious that they made a mistake. Promos are meant to incentivize long-term action. They hate APs who cash and run. If they get long-term action from you, they will cut you a lot of slack even if you are winning for months or years.

Read the specific promo rules carefully. Read the general terms of service, as well.

if it is an overseas site based in somewhere in the Atlantic ocean, I wouldn't trust it. If there is no reason for them to offer you this, I wouldn't trust it. What I mean is they would need to have decided you are a real whale, not too smart about his gambling. I would be very surprised to find that everybody gets this deal.

the simple rule for taking advantage of a loss rebate is to lose big. You heard that right.

There should be more in the fine print than you are giving us. Isn't there usually a limit, such as the loss rebate not kicking in until you lose $10,000 or something like that. Then when you lose 10,100 you aren't gaining any advantage. Do you have the balls to lose many multiples?

You would certainly want to have total faith in their reliability.

Main components of calculating this are going to be the house edge and standard deviation of game at play as well as a bankroll and number of trials. And the rebate % of course. Bankroll you can turn into units rather than a dollar amount to test different bet sizes.

You can build a calculator in excel and play with different bankroll, bet sizes, and number of trials. From here you can play with the variables of bet size, number of trials to get your answers. You can build a calculator with formulas in excel for this stuff, the math isn't really heavy it's pretty much arithmetic, it's just figuring out the variables in the correct sequence. I have taken exactly one college math course in my life and am capable of stuff at this level.

You will really want to learn how to do this yourself for several reasons, and no one should want to spoon feed it to you any more than I just did for others. There will be the optimal answer, and then there'll be answers that trade some amount of EV for an increase in win probability and perhaps less time spent or perhaps your stomach for losses.

An additional reason you'll want to have a calculator and do the work youself is that being aware of and reasonably close to optimal strategy but not going exactly optimal MIGHT make it more likely you'll get paid. But you'll need to be able to plug in numbers yourself to know if close to optimal is any good or good enough for you.

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if you made a $1,000 baccarat bet somewhere in the middle of your slot losses every 7 days on Player -

a typical result that can show how large your edge is that if you made 100 bets of $1,000 and you won 49 bets and lost 51 bets and the bets were always on Player you would have bet $100,000 and you would have lost $2,000

you would have lost 2% of your action well more than the house edge which is 1.24% on Player

but they will rebate you 12% on your losses of $51,000 - which is $6,120

which means you will have won $4,120 after subtracting the $2K loss

which means your edge is greater than 4.12% (don't wanna take the time to figure it exactly - prolly around 5%)

as you indicated in your OP your edge will be even greater if the bets are on the Banker - I just used Player to make calculating the edge easier

that's a very healthy edge - but of course because of standard deviation you could lose many thou even with the edge - or win much more than shown

I don't play online so I don't know enough to say whether they would consider that bonus abuse - but I tend to doubt it

others may chime in with greater knowledge - I was just trying to get close to figuring a raw edge

.

I would never advise anyone to do a 12% loss rebate unless I knew them very well and knew their financial situation. Even if you do simulations and you have some numbers regarding how bad it can go, it takes a special sort of person to throw big bet after big bet on banker and watch player come up 9 times out of 10, or vice versa. The edge isn't that big and you don't get to the long run unless you keep on making the big bets.

Quote: Mental

I would never advise anyone to do a 12% loss rebate unless I knew them very well and knew their financial situation. Even if you do simulations and you have some numbers regarding how bad it can go, it takes a special sort of person to throw big bet after big bet on banker and watch player come up 9 times out of 10, or vice versa. The edge isn't that big and you don't get to the long run unless you keep on making the big bets.
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I agree with that
I wasn't advising him to make big bets such as that
I was just using it as an example
but I should have made the example for $100 bets, not $1,000 bets
in his OP he mentioned the maximum bacc bet for the rebate being $2,000
and he asked "is max betting the best strategy"
of course no one can answer that without knowing the size of his bankroll and other info

.

I should definitely provide more clarity on the rebate.

Rebate is done at the end of each 7 day period on total loss.

The max bet is $2k. eg 4 x $500 hands per deal.

I did follow some other posters here and created an excel calculator. The answer I got is that it's optimal for me to win max bet each hand, and stop at either 7 wins or losses. If there are 7 units of losses, realise the loss, take the rebate and wait for the next 7 day period.

I'm not sure if I am calculating volatility correct though. Separately, I'm not sure how to get started in building a simulator.

Thank you to all for commenting and giving tips.

This means that I can only make one $1k bet every 7 days.

This would take me 700 days to win $4120. Decent but I'm greedy. ><

Quote: Rburg88

The max bet is $2k. eg 4 x $500 hands per deal.

if you are referring to blackjack - which I think you are - you only mentioned bacc in your op - there is free bj software from Norm Wattenberger; one of the game's very top experts - see link

this would likely help in clearly seeing the effects of the game's volatility

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https://www.qfit.com/free-blackjack-software.htm

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One of the effective tactics of playing with cashback - play as two separate gamblers which everyone has such conditions, and make bets opposite to each other.

If you gamble alone, the more volatility the game has - the more adv cashback gives.

I have lost the maximum on two $7,500 loss rebates this month. I have been running bad since June 3rd.

I was offered a $333 max loss rebate today. I did one spin on a Blazing Bison Gold Blitz at the $50 max bet.



I guess I won't be getting any rebate today.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Mental’s world…!

Quote: camapl

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Mental’s world…!
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I made all of the flies on my wall sign NDAs.

Quote: Mental

Quote: camapl

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Mental’s world…!
link to original post

I made all of the flies on my wall sign NDAs.
link to original post

As long as there’s no non-compete…!