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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   1786 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 31, 2025

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Anyone know some ways for a person — one without any particular skills at either coding or handicrafts — to make a few extra bucks online?

If you're in the US, you could grind the casinos for 'showing up' bonuses. Apparently you can make 50-100 dollars an hour for one hour per day. :

https://www.themotte.org/post/2068/friday-fun-thread-for-june-6/333425?context=8#context

Hi, I actually tried this and I'll warn against it. I got really excited by the same ACX review and here was my experience:

  1. Difficulty of finding expectation

The entire scheme revolves around using high expectation, low variance ("return to player" as the games call it). It is basically impossible to get an accurate take on which slot games are like this.

Even the ones that have this buried somewhere don't quite add up. For example there was a game that apparently had a 96% return to player over "thousands of spins". I did maybe 2k spins with the minimum possible bet of 10 cents to kill variance. For every 120 stakescoins I had, I was lucky to get back 98 and cash out without too much of a loss. Remember that according to the promised expectation I was supposed to get 117.6 which, given the $100 real money that this cost me I should have gotten $17.60 of profit.

  1. Counterparty risk

This was mentioned in the original ACX review which led me down this rabbit hole, but it's kind of serious. You will be risking $100 to make at best $20 in profit. The ACX guy was nonchalant about it, saying you could tell your credit card to cancel the payment but I've never tried it in practice. Be ready to wait for a week to get your money back.

  1. Time

Still takes a hell of a lot of time. The ACX reviewer had some bot system and also had been doing this for a while. I felt like he was heavily discounting the time it takes initially to set things up and find the right casinos and games and so on. Lists and "advice" online are fake and looking to cash in on referral fees.

  1. Savvy

This is the entire damn problem. The ACX guy made it sound so easy. He even began to muse "what if you had UBI and nobody came?". He made it sound like literally anybody with no skills could do this.

This actually requires a lot of savvy and isn't quite as foolproof as he made it out to be. Finding the right casinos, games, etc.

It's what I realized with sports betting arbitrage. Or thinking about getting good at poker. There's no free lunch. No money lying on the sidewalk.

In the end I cut all my losses and closed my positions and got a part-time retail job.

Interesting. I really want to argue with your points, but since I don’t have any experience doing this (not in the US), I’ll cede the field.

Yeah, possibly the biggest barrier is the need for some seed capital and the willingness to take some counterparty risk on it. The guy seemed like he was juggling/transferring thousands of dollars per day to take advantage of the credit card bonuses and the cheap tokens. You’d probably need like 20-50k starting capital you’re ready to lose (although I think the risk is not that big), and, like you say, a considerable time investment, before you can earn his full one hour a day salary.

Anyway, if it's a hassle, or less lucrative than advertised, it's probably better to do something less zero sum.

We are on the same side. If you have any way or maybe even specific online casinos to recommend please go ahead. Who would not want to sit at home and make $50/hr?

This game isn't really zero-sum either. The company wins because they have to do this by regulation. The gamblers whose losses you gain win because the online sweepstakes casinos continue existing because they can maintain the legal fiction.

Even though you're abroad just use a VPN. You might even be better off because the IRS won't get after you for your winnings

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