Have you tried monitoring their progressive games with the SNS signature trick, to see if they're being honest?
I've not. I looked at the progressive games when they were first introduced, and saw that the way they worked meant that sometimes they were incredibly worth playing. After making a nice profit playing them at the right time the rules were changed. Now they're almost never worth playing. The expected return is horrible. As a result almost nobody plays them, so I decided just to ignore them.
Look at the current progressive pot. I have a 0.02596% chance of turning 0.25 BTC into 626.0639 BTC. That's a 1 in 3852 chance of multiplying my stake by 2504. Or in other words a 65% expected return.
>>> 100 * 626.0639 0.25 (100 0.02596)
65.010475376
I expect they're being honest though. At those odds why would they need to cheat?
Edit: this game did puzzle me for a while though. They claim to only take a 2% cut from the progressive games - each time the pot is won, they take their small cut, give 65% to the player, and leave the rest in the pot for the next winner. So if the players are getting a 65% return, and the house is only taking 2%, where does the rest go?
To simplify the game, consider these rules:
* you're the only person playing
* each turn costs 1 BTC
* when you win, you win the whole pot
* when you lose, your whole bet gets added to the pot
* each time you bet, your odds of winning are 1 in (pot * 10)
So
* each bet has an expected return of 10%, or 0.1 BTC (you're betting 1 BTC to win 'pot' BTC, with a 1-in-(pot*10) chance of winning)
* but eventually you win, and get all your money back - doesn't this imply your expected return of 100% in the long term?
These two contradict each other - the return can't be 10% each bet, and 100% in the long term.
I think the way I eventually resolved the contradiction is that "eventually you win" isn't true. You might give up before you win. In that case the house gets to keep the whole pot. And the same applies in the SD progressive game, I think. They only take 2% if the pot is won, but it's quite likely that the pot won't ever be won, in which case they keep everything.
