Magic Dice...Wild Ride

Last night I decided to play around with Magic Dice and see how I would do. I was down and then down over and over as you would expect from a game of chance. It was fun at times and then pissed me off at times...all of which made for a wild ride. This post will serve a little as a "How To", also as a "Review", and lastly to give information about a new Token that will be starting to pay holders a Steem dividend.

_{Logo of @magicdice, all rights belong to owner.}

What is Magic Dice?

Magic Dice is a simple game that you pick if the next "roll" will be under or over a number that you choose. Numbers are 1-100 and the house edge is 2% on each bet (see below). The game is so simple to play that anyone can do it assuming you have a Steem Account and Steem/SBD in your account to wager. The lowest bet currently is 0.10 Steem and the Highest is 500 Steem. This huge range of bets allowed lets just about anyone to join in.

Magic Dice does require you to log in via SteemConnect or KeyChain. I personally haven't used KeyChain yet so went with SteemConnect. As both of these login methods are considered to be safe I was fine with logging in first with my posting key to access the website and then with my Active Key to play.

Making bets

Here is a screenshot of the main betting page:

The first part you fill in is how much you want to bet, which like I said currently is 0.1-500 steem. This shot also shows you what multiplier will be applied to your bet based on the odds of the bet you are making. It's all very transparent in how much you will be paid before you make your bet.

You have a slider bar at the bottom of the page that lets you select Under on the left or Over on the right and then choose what number you want to pick between 1-100.

House Edge...yes they have to make money

Naturally they have to make money so they have a house edge built into every bet. The declared house edge currently is sitting at 2%. This means each wager is giving up an edge to the house of 2%. You can see this by looking at the bet example I used in the screen shot. It's a 49% win chance bet yet they are only paying out like it's a 50% bet (paying double). So a 1 Steem bet pays 2 steem due to the house edge when it should be paying 2.04 steem. You can run the numbers on any bet and it's the same thing, 2% is coming off the top in the payout percentage.

@themarkymark actually ran a large test of the claim of a 2% house edge and found that it's holding true once you reach a large data set. You can read his post Is Magic Dice Provably Fair? about this.

Lets make this VERY clear. Placing bets is meant to be fun, not a way to pay your bills!

That said last night was a fun and wild ride of ups and downs while I played for a couple hours. I made a nice little profit in terms of STEEM and a ton of MAGIC Tokens...

MAGIC Tokens...Added Bonus!

MAGIC Tokens is the only reason I decided to try out Magic Dice. These MAGIC tokens will be used to distribute the earnings from the 2% house in the near future (not happening yet). So not only does Magic Dice have a low house edge they will be distributing up to 70% of their MAGIC Token to the players so they can get dividends.

10% of the Tokens will be given to the "Team"
20% of the Tokens will be for "Development/Maintenance

_{Image Source}

These tokens will be an SMT on the Steem blockchain once SMT's are available to be issued. The Tokens will then be able to be bought/sold and have their own value...very cool! Here read a snippet from the website:

MAGIC tokens will be created as SMTs(Smart Media Tokens) when SMTs become available on Steem. Until then, the tokens are only getting distributed, but aren't transferrable or tradable. The dividend payout will start before the MAGIC Tokens are created as SMTs, in February 2019.

Now in one evening I earned 329,677.5 MAGIC Tokens. There will be a total of 7 Billion Tokens issues, so this is a small amount of the overall total (0.0047%) but should give me some sort of payout on earnings. To put it in perspective 1% of total tokens will be 70 million tokens. Currently as of writing there are 18.8% of all tokens issued and you can earn 25 MAGIC per Steem wagered. This payout halves every time 5% of tokens are issued...so it gets much harder to earn them later vs playing now.

This point is why I decided to play now and earn a bunch of tokens before it gets nearly impossible to earn them. In a matter of days the same play from last night will only earn 164,838.75 tokens and give or take a few weeks after that only 82,419.375 tokens. That said over the next couple months the rate of tokens being issued will drop drastically but still be much better then in a year from now. Figured might as well set myself up for a trickle of Steem income from the house edge. Long term income sources are always a nice thing to have.

Referral Bonus

In this post a few times I linked to the Magic Dice website and each time it's a referral link. If you plan to sign up please make sure to use someones link...no reason for the house to keep the referral money. This will be another trickle of money as they pay back to the referrer 10% of the house edge and a 10% bonus of the MAGIC tokens earned by anyone you refer. This means if someone bets 100 times at 1 steem per bet, total 100 Steem the house edge is 2 Steem and 2500 MAGIC tokens are issued. 10% of each is 0.2 Steem and 250 Magic tokens.

Again not a huge amount of money, but if you decide to test out Magic Dice due to this post I would appreciate you using the link.

Magic Dice Upvotes

A new addition
is that the @magicdice account will give out random upvotes. I'll just let you read the snippet about this from their last post.

A lot of users encouraged us to use our STEEM Power for the community. That's why Magic Dice now uses all the collected STEEM Power to reward players on Magic Dice.
Every time Magic Dice reaches 100% Voting Power, it will upvote a random player who played in the last 24 hours. The voting strength will be determined by a dice roll (1-100).
The more you wager, the higher your chance to receive an upvote.

As of my writing this post I haven't gotten an upvote on this account from my play yesterday, but considering their VP the vote could be huge if the dice roll is high enough.

How did I do?

While my results mean nothing in terms of what you will do or what I will do in the future I'm happy to say I made a profit of 70.5 Steem. Now 70.5 STEEM for the volume of bets I made is actually pretty small, but it was a win. Was able to earn a ton of MAGIC tokens while closing the screen knowing I had a nice profit which is more then all my blogging efforts (excluding paid votes) for the last 2 months give or take so not bad at all.

Idea for Future Development

One thing I'd love to see added in future development for Magic Dice is a banned list of people who can register their accounts to make sure they can't place any bets. This would act like casinos list of self registered banned people due to having gambling problems. This list would help reduce the risk of people loosing money they can't afford.

Overall thoughts

I enjoy gambling and understand it's a form of entertainment. If I had lost $100 worth of steem last night it wouldn't have bothered me as I had the itch to run to the casino and play poker but we had -20 F degree temps with -50 F wind chills yesterday so odds are the poker room would have been empty. I was prepared to transfer money to coinbase if I lost and cover my losses so it would't have effected my account.

That said it was fun and did help fill my urge to do something other then sit around watching TV with my Wife at night. Without leaving the house I still felt like I had gotten to do something which is enjoyable to me. My entertainment value was there for sure.

The game does use your RC's so smaller members need to pay attention to this. Each bet creates a transaction as you send the STEEM to Magic Dice. If you plan to play for a while and have less then a couple hundred SP you may run into issues. You can always solve this by leasing SP or by powering up some SP. Either one gives you an instant RC increase. This wasn't an issue for my account and even after playing for a couple hours my RC level was still at 94%, by far the lowest I've seen since everything equalized.

Plan to play again to grow my MAGIC token balance and have a good time while doing it. I'll give some updates along the way so you can see my results.

One Last Thing

Felt I needed to say this yet again as I've seen people with gambling problems loose everything. Don't play with money you can't afford to loose. Seriously this isn't a way to make money and I honestly debated not sharing that I won for fear some idiot would think hey I can go win 70 steem in a night too. I just as easily could have lost 350 steem as that was what I allowed myself to play with for the night. This needs to be entertainment or even a planned allowable loss to earn the MAGIC Tokens, either of those is an acceptable reason to play.