Since EOS Knights has become less interesting, both in terms of game play (it's hard to make progress) as well as from a financial standpoint, I've been checking which other DApps on EOS I could spend my time on and I found...Endless Game. How? I looked at stateofthedapps.com:
The super-high number of users piqued my interest, even though I didn't really believe it's actually that high, so I cross-checked dappradar.com which is showing a much lower number:
Weirdly, Dappradar is showing a higher volume that SotD...
Anyway, I wanted to check out a dice game on EOS.
What's Endless Game?
Mostly, Endless Game is a more complex Dice game. The dice part is basically exactly what you know from all other dice games on blockchain: you put in your bet and the number you bet you'll roll the dice under (e.g. 42), and you'll get a potential payout that provides you with an expected value (EV) of 0.98 per 1 EOS. Sounds weird? Let's check an example:
As you can see, the chance of winning in this case if 49% and the payout is double the bet, giving you precisely a 0.98 EV.
ET & Dividends
It gets more interesting if you take into consideration the Endless Token (ET) and the dividends. If you've seen other dice games, this is nothing special; you "mine" ET by playing - currently 2.5 ET per 1 EOS bet on the dice game - and if you stake you ET, you get daily dividend payouts. The total amount of dividends is 10% of the total dividend pool...the dividend pool itself is being fed by 10% of the house edge Endless Game has.
Currently, the dividend pool is about 1400 EOS, so about 140 EOS are being paid out daily to the holders of the roughly 88 million staked ET.
You wouldn't need to mine ET, though, you can also buy them at newdex.io, currently at about 0.0008, meaning 1 EOS gets you ~1250 ET. Let's keep that in mind for later.
When playing dice, at the current rate you'd need to wager 500 EOS to generate 1250 ET. The mining rate will be subject to a halving (down to 1.25 per EOS) once 128m ET have been mined, which will be the case in 30m ET. Therefore, if you want to mine ET, a good idea would be to do that now.
VIP
This is really interesting. Once you've wagered at least 1000 EOS, you become a VIP. The following levels are available and give you cashback on playing games:
It's fairly easy to become V1, but honestly you gotta be a bit crazy to try to make it to V12. The highest I've seen is V10, so there are (multiple) people who've wagered at least 1m EOS on that site...
Leaderboard & Lottery
There's a Leaderboard that's being calculated every 6 hours, and prizes are paid to the top 10 players every 6 hours. It pays off to be first on the leaderboard, as the prize money halves with every place. The additional prize pool for the leaderboard is 15% of the house edge of all dice bets within these 6 hours.
In addition to the EOS you get, you can also get lottery tickets. The lottery takes place every 12 hours, and in case you get tickets from the leaderboard those will be automatically used in the next available lottery. You can also buy tickets at 0.05 EOS each.
The likelihood of winning is rather difficult to calculate, but it's kinda similar to classic "6 out of 49" lotteries - pretty low indeed. If you manage to pull off the main prize, you may win around 50 EOS, as the last examples have shown.
Other games
There's other games, too, but the only interesting one apart from dice is "Crash", which is just like Moonsteem, which probably most of you know.
Is this profitable?
Short answer: on a short-term, no. In the long run, maybe. Let's do some math:
Imagine we wager 1 million EOS at whatever probability; most of the "pros" use the highest likelihood, but the EV is the same whatever you do, so it doesn't matter. Only the variance differs, but this is irrelevant at 1m wagered EOS.
Anyway, if you wager 1m, at an EV of 0.98 / EOS, you'll end up "winning" 980k EOS on average, thereby losing 20k EOS. Sounds pretty bad, and there's no way around this.
However, let's look at the VIP stuff:
- For the first 1000 EOS, you get nothing.
- For the next 4000 EOS, you get 0.01%
- For the next 5000 EOS, you get 0.03%
And so on.
So once you reach the 1m EOS, you'll have accumulated a cashback of 908.4 EOS, which we can deduct from the 20k.
Next up is the leaderboard:
You should try to make first on the leaderboard all the time. This can make you between 0.2 and 0.5% cashback on your wager, depending on how close you are to the next player, and how much has been wagered in total. In addition, you receive 50 lottery tickets if you place first:
(in this case, eosjjsslove5 made roughly 3.2 EOS on ~560 EOS wagered, making up for 0.57% plus 50 tickets)
So if you can wager 1m EOS at at good rate to that you place first in the leaderboard, let's account for another 0.3% cashback from leaderboard + lottery, giving you back 3000 EOS from your 1m.
Lastly, let's look at the Endless Tokens:
1m wagered EOS get you 2.5m ET. At roughly the rate we've been discussin above (0.0008 EOS / ET) your 2.5m ET will be worth roughly 2000 EOS if you sold them.
All in all, you would roughly lose (20000 - 900 - 3000 - 2000) = ~14000 EOS when betting 1m EOS. However, let's look at the dividends, maybe that's more interesting:
Your 2.5m ET would be 2.8% of all staked ET, granting you a daily dividend of about 4 EOS. So if you kept all the ET staked and bet 1m EOS (thereby losing about 16k, not 14k because you've kept the tokens), you'd get back your investment - if nothing changes - after roughly 4000 days or 11 years. Isn't that great? :-)
However, if you think that EOS will grow and therefore gambling like Endless Game will grow, too, investing in the tokens for dividend could be a good option. That said, it would pay to just buy the tokens: for 16000 EOS, you could simply buy 20m ET, giving you roughly 32 EOS in dividend every day or a 72% yearly ROI, which actually sounds pretty great (in case nothing changes in the game). For that, though, there still need to be enough people actually playing.
Some last words
Obviously, Endless Game, like all other gambling sites on blockchain, is meant for fun, not for making money. You can't make money in the long run with gambling due to the house edge, that's gotta be clear to everyone. In addition, Endless Game, just like all the other gambling sites, is unregulated gambling, so it's probably not legal in the country you're in. In addition, the tokens giving you dividends are a promise for future cash flows, so ET would probably be considered a security in many countries. Be aware of that. If you still want to play, feel free to use my referral link so I can get some free ET :-) In case this should be a significant amount, I'll share.
The best thing about Endless Game is that I've managed to make around 5k on-chain transaction per hour using the Autobet feature in combination with whitelisting in Scatter and the Scatter browser plugin (which is outdated, I know, but it's much faster than the desktop app). Try it out, it's really amazing how many bets you can make and how well the EOS blockchain performs.
Please let me know what you think and whether you've found other strategies to be more profitable.