I have been playing Magic Dice since the day I first heard about it. I am not a gambler and I don't gamble. I am far too aggressive to gamble safely and not take outrageous risks or just roll one more time.
So how have I managed to make 588.052 bets on Magic Dice and not be homeless? Before I answer that, let me put that number in perspective.
Each bet takes 6-9 seconds, one block for the bet and one for the response. It may take an additional block delay to get a response back.
- 588,052 bets * 6 seconds = 3,528,312 seconds
- 3,528,312 seconds / 60 seconds = 58,805.20 minutes
- 58,805.20 minutes / 60 minutes = 980.087 hours
- 980.087 hours / 24 hours = 40.837 days.
40.837 days of play time! Magic Dice has been around for around 4 months, but surely I wasn't playing nearly 41 days worth of play time.
I did not, I created a bot to play for me. This isn't new, there are a lot of Magic Dice bots out there being used. Can they sustain themselves over 588,052 bets? No, I doubt it. Even mine can't. It does very well though and paired with other strategies I have been able to not lose my shirt over nearly 600,000 bets.
When I first started Magic Dice, I was playing manually. Most people who know me know that I prefer to automate anything I need to do more than once. After playing for a few days I built a bot to play for me. It was simple and just played the martingale strategy most people are using.
I found this worked well enough, but the streaks would wreck my bankroll and it wasn't sustainable. If I won 10 times in a row, I would make 10 Steem on a 1 Steem starting bet. If I lost 10 times in a row, I would lose 1024 Steem. The frequently long losing streaks happen in Magic Dice are scary, and I couldn't win 1025 Steem before I would hit this ceiling. I had to come up with another way.
I started to add some logic to alter how it used the martingale strategy. This worked really well but still would cause great loses on losing streaks, which I learned to recover fairly well. The problem came when I had multiple losing streaks back to back I would be forced to recover quite often. Although I have a recovery mode, a lot of times recovery was done manually. This is time-consuming and I wanted to avoid this at all costs. It also put me at greater risk as I am a horrible gambler.
Initially, my bots would run for around 30-120 minutes before I hit a recovery mode. Over time I have managed 4-8 hour windows in some circumstances as long as 24 hours without a recovery session.
The thing is, I wasn't running one bot, I was running 2-8 at any given time!
This became exhausting at times when I had multiple failures at once. I didn't like to bet manually, I didn't like the time or the risk.
Over time I have both my bots and my own betting has gotten much smarter and today I have reached Pure Zero.
Pure Zero doesn't mean a thing, it's just something I call it. But let me back up a little...
The beginning
When I first started Magic Dice I spent the first few days playing manually. I was doing good, real good. I was up 6,000 Steem and was able to go from 87 Steem to over 5,000 Steem in one sprint.
But then it happened, I started to lose money. I chased loses too far, and took just one more roll too much. I was down over 16,000 Steem. I even got a message from someone asking me "Why are you rolling so much on Magic Dice" when they noticed my bot going.
While losing wasn't on purpose, it was a cross between taking a risk for a potential token distribution like other blockchain games have, and build up as many bets and wagered amounts as possible without going broke.
Then Magic Dice dividends were announced. My strategy paid off, I already had millions of tokens but I was still in massive debt.
At this point, I started working on getting back to a break even. It took a while, I would go from -16,000 Steem to -8,000 Steem and back to -12,000 Steem over and over. My bots were great at farming tokens, and really good at making forward progress but I would have setbacks.
I made more tweaks to my bots and how I went about things, and reduced those setbacks and made them less damaging. Right now, at any given point I am running around 4 bots betting simultaneously.
They go on until they eventually incur a small amount of loses, these losses don't always mean the cycle is a net loss, just that it's time to take a break. Technically it didn't matter, if I restart the bot or let it run, each bet going forward didn't depend on the last. I mainly wanted to do damage control, never lose more than I can quickly recover and even if a bot cycle was net positive, would want to earn back some of the loses during the cycle so it wouldn't have washed all the wins.
I adjusted how much I did that, and I found my best strategy is to avoid playing manually as much as possible. The bots were good, I was the biggest risk.
Pure Zero
So what is Pure Zero? When you play Magic Dice you can win or lose but you always earn Magic Tokens. These Magic Tokens give you daily dividend payouts based on how many tokens you own out of the total distributed pool. If you have referred anyone to the game, you also get referral rewards.
When I calculate how much I have lost, I am doing a sweep of the blockchain (technically I'm using SQL DB as it is faster) and calculating sends - receive transactions. That net result is my win/loss total. Because referrals and dividends are also sent via transfers, this was factored in. I have another way to find out without factoring them in, but on a day to day basis I didn't use this.
Pure Zero is when I am above $0 in wins without adding in dividends or referrals. I reached that point today, after almost 30 days of working to get back there.
Stats
I have bet 588,710 times at the time I got to this point in the post and have wagered a total of 1,487,167 Steem and 23.407 SBD since I started playing.
I am 1,174 Steem positive since I started playing around 2 months ago.
I have received 2896.591 Steem and 12.1719 SBD in daily dividends which puts me at 4,661.757 Steem profit.
More importantly, I have acquired 41,444,306 Magic Tokens.
I'm going to slow down a bit and see how the dividends payout. I currently make anywhere from 40 Steem to 420 Steem from dividends and hope new games coming will make them worth more. I won't stop playing, but I won't spend as much time on it.
Magic Tokens
You earn Magic Tokens if you delegate to @magicdice, play Magic Dice, and referring other players to Magic Dice.
These tokens give you a larger share of the daily dividend payouts. Rumors are you will be able to use them to bet in the future (burning them in the process).
When SMTs arrive, you will be to buy, sell, and trade Magic Tokens.
How much are Magic Tokens worth?
There isn't any price as they cannot be traded, bought, or sold. I am estimating they will be worth around 912.50 Steem per 1 million tokens.
How did I come up with that figure?
In my experience, dividends payout around 1 Steem - 10 Steem per 1M tokens. One year of future profits is typically what is used to estimate a price on a company or revenue stream. Because this is crypto and who knows what will happen in 12 months, I will cut this figure in half. I will also use the middle of the road estimate for daily dividends payout.
- 5 Steem (Daily Dividend Average Per 1M Tokens) * 356 = 1,825 Steem
- 1,825 Steem / 2 (Let's assume 6 months) = 912.50 Steem per 1M
0.0009125 Steem per Magic
Who knows what they will sell for, but I personally wouldn't sell them for less than that.
I get asked often, would I recommend Magic Dice, is Magic Dice safe, what's your strategy?
I always answer the same, I do not recommend it. I am a shitty gambler, and I find it very risky. The house will always win in the end. If you do decide to do, be safe, be smart, and don't spend anything you can't risk to lose.