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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1815 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 6, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Astral Codex Ten's Non-Book Review Contest has one particularly interesting entry: Arbitraging Several Dozen Online Casinos. tl;dr:

  • In most of the US, online casino gambling (labeled "iGaming" on this interactive map) is illegal. In order to circumvent this restriction, zillions of companies have seized on the same workaround that Japanese pachinko parlors exploit: users pay real money to buy "valueless" tokens that cannot be exchanged for real money (sweeps coins), and then use those tokens to gamble for tokens that can be exchanged for real money. These online casinos are known as "sweepstakes" or "sweeps" casinos.

  • Recall that many traditional casino games have very low house edges. For example, "French roulette" (European single-zero roulette where you have only a 50-% chance of losing your money when you get the zero) has a house edge of only 1/74 (1.35 %).

  • Apparently: (1) Just like gacha games, these sweeps casinos have daily log-in bonuses, averaging 0.5 $/d. So, if you sign up for 36 different casinos, and then use those free daily sweeps coins to play games with low house edges, you will make nearly 18 $/d for next to zero effort. (2) These sweeps casinos often have temporary sales for purchasing sweeps coins with real money. At 5 to 15 %, the discount rates for these sales usually vastly exceed the house edge. (3) If you exploit these sales, the casinos will see that you are spending a lot of money, assume that you are a gambling-addicted "whale", and give you even more bonuses. (4) At a normal casino, a credit-card purchase of chips counts as a cash advance, since those chips can be exchanged right back to real money. But, at a sweeps casino, a purchase of sweeps coins counts as a normal purchase of goods, since the sweeps coins cannot be cashed out before you gamble with them. So, at a sweeps casino, you can get your normal credit-card rewards of 2 % or more.

  • According to the review, all these effects can be stacked to make 95 $/d by "working" for a single hour per day, which multiplies out to a very livable income of 35 k$/a—and that's assuming you don't use bots. (Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage", and not to be confused with ban-worthy "bonus abuse" as defined in various online casinos' terms of service.)

Some cursory searching indicates that the proper term for such strategies is "bonus hunting", not "arbitrage"

I would agree- arbitrage has a very specific technical definition that is not remotely equivalent to "free money". It gets abused often and is frequently used in get rich quick training course scams and the like.

You can execute an arbitrage strategy in gambling, but its much more likely to pop up in things like sports betting where you could buy the opposite sides of a result at different books under the right odds, ensuring a profit regardless of outcomes. Bookies are generally competent enough to avoid this situation though.

Man - bring in credit card rewards and we're almost back to the glory days of points churning

I remember back in the boom years of online poker before it got banned in the US, a number of people did things like that. People who weren't good enough to make money playing in a normal way would play just enough to clear the bonuses that sites gave to new players. They called it "bonus grinding" or "bonus whoring." The main caveat, I think, is that it's an incredibly soulless, boring way to make money. It still requires a certain amount of mental effort, and without even the fig leaf of pretending like you're doing something beneficial to society. So most people got bored of doing it, and started to play for real, sometimes losing back the money they earned from the bonus.

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