I finally get it, thanks, guys. I've been wondering about this for years (literally) and it's not something one can figure out with google. Now I know why.

Dooglus' bad strategy is not something I had ever considered and pretty much changed the way I look at things:

Quote from: dooglus on October 15, 2016, 10:37:56 PM

To try to pick a 'bad' strategy, what if we bet 1 BTC with a 90% chance of a 1x payout ten times in a row... Those are also 10% house edge bets.

We have a 0.9 ** 10 = 0.3486784401 probability of winning all ten bets and ending up with our original 1 BTC. That's an EV of 0.3486 BTC.

Quote from: ndnh on October 16, 2016, 02:51:48 AM

Nope. You would need to know the variance of the game you are playing, just finding that is difficult.

Are you referring to Pocketdice? Their cashback is +EV, all the rest is -EV.

Haven't looked too closely at Pocketdice. Mostly motivated by the way all those coingaming and softswiss type sites like to act as if their 100%+ first-time deposit bonuses are so generous that they have to hold cashouts hostage for player dox to make sure nobody is "abusing their bonuses." Offering that same bonus for every deposit all the time would probably only cost them money because they wouldn't be able to cancel as many withdraws.

Does anyone know where I could find some software to run simulations of simple slot type games? For example, If I could run a million simulations of a game that either paid out 0x 2x 20x or 200x with a 5% HE with limits and a basic betting strategy, I could figure out a reasonable number to put on different bonuses.

I think most of the people running these sites are pretty oblivious and just do what has become standard. Would be nice to enlighten them, or something.