[...]Not only that releasing the address beforehand is stupid; the rough time of the game should be announced (+/- random 10 minutes) and whoever is lucky enough to get the address first can deposit the soonest.
That will always be the bots. A bot can process the contents of a webpage, extract the address, and initiate payments to that address before you've even registered that there's a new address on the page.
While I do believe that this is ultimately doomed to fail, the existing setup does allows human players a chance to get at least one "bet" in before it's too late. I'm not running any scripts or bots and I was the 12th payout for Day #3; my "bet" was received at 00:00:01.
The fact that the time is fixed and the address is fixed puts bots and humans on equal footing for the first deposit. A bot would have an advantage to a human playing with a single wallet for the 2nd deposit done in the game.
If you vary the time and/or vary the address you take away any advantage the human has and give bots a huge advantage. It is easy for code to cope with both of those issues. A bot can even use multiple IP's to watch the websites. Only the fact that all information is know gives human players a chance.
I doubt there are actually any bots being used. I've written bots before and it isn't worth writing a bot for this. There are just too many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. What you are seeing is people watching the clock and hitting the "ok" button when they see it is time to play. A few dozen humans doing that looks just the same as a bunch of bots.