This post concerns www.thisisvegas.com and its skins Paradise 8 ( Paradise8 ), Cocoa Casino, and Davinci's Gold. Their tournaments are pooled together. Henceforth, I shall simply refer to ThisIsVegas and skins as "TIV". I and others have unresolved complaints against TIV for varying reasons. However, I will be focusing only on tournaments in this particular post. If you have an account at TIV, you may want to look up a few complaints as they intersect with issues of credibility. By the end, I hope to show why I suspect TIV added imaginary scores to their tournament leader boards so as to pay real players less (while making them feel at the cusp of big wins) and did so in a lazy and formulaic way that is easy to detect. Since my full argument is over the maximum post size, I have pasted a link to the full intended version of this post.
First, a few notes so you can understand how TIV conducted its tournaments. They operated far outside of industry norms. See if a few alarm bells don't start ringing.
-TIV ran tournaments with advertised prize pools that had routinely reached $500,000 to $1,000,000 per tournament (and still do). Except by emails to existing customers, I am unaware of any meaningful promotion for these tourneys. If you look around on their site, you'll see what I mean. To my knowledge, at face value, TIV runs the largest tournaments/raffles on the internet. Yet, they are labeled as a "rather small casino" by www.sistersitesindex.com.
-TIV had no dedicated link on their website itemizing the rules and details of their tourneys. Emails advertising them failed to establish or reference any T&C and almost always failed to mention there was an entry requirement. Instead, these emails merely established the scoring systems and the face value of the prize pools. Contacting support was necessary for full details.
-For the initial tournaments that I observed, coinciding to a change in management in late 2022, entry requirements were mandated deposits of $500-$1000. This escalated to $3000 within a few months.
-Originally, I received repeated confirmations that the prize pools were cash. Months later, TIV would overrule those confirmations and reestablish prizes that I had already won as non-cashable bonuses. TIV then revoked those bonuses when I escalated a complaint.
-TIV only made tournament results available to participating entrants.
-TIV's tourneys started Mondays at 12:00 am and ended Wednesday night at midnight. Presumably, this would represent the part of the week that their customers would have been most conflicted with work.
-There was no dedicated tournament software and no live leader board. Results were not sent until hours after a tourney ended. A snapshot of each leader board (as it was Tuesday or Wednesday morning around 6:00 am EST) was available upon request.
-When results were published, only scores and the corresponding prizes were published. Those scores were never matched to particular accounts.
-When receiving a prize, any net gain in (balance+pending withdrawals) during the tourney would be deducted from the prize you'd receive. This could lead to receiving no prize at all.
With the above facts in mind, I will now present my evidence. Unless noted otherwise, most of the scoring in the presented tournaments comes from $1 wagered equals 1 point. Maybe 10% of the scoring came from new deposits. The leader boards can be approximated as total wagered. All my available leader boards can be found in a file I've provided a link to at the bottom for reference. I have essentially posted all the early tournaments at TIV since they changed management in 2022. Later leader boards were not made available to me because I stopped playing.
The leader board below, the first I have on record, is a good ambassador of the distribution of scores that typifies TIV's leader boards.
10/14/2022 Final Scores
Place Prize 50K Total points
1 10000 USD 967,753
2 8000 USD 931,441
3 6000 USD 899,887
4 5000 USD 866,784
5 3500 USD 823,042
6 3000 USD 798,772
7 2000 USD 763,802
8 1600 USD 752,991
9 1500 USD 741,901
10 1200 USD 717,559
Here, 1st place, with a prize 8.5 times that of 10th place, has a score only 35% greater. Scores rarely distribute anything close to this at other casinos. By itself, this leader board might be an outlier. However, not once, anywhere in the 11 tournaments I have on record, have I seen a breakaway 1st place score at TIV or even a semi-breakaway score. Elsewhere, they are common. To reinforce this point, there is no live leader board, so players can not strategically herd together. Herding is a common occurrence where players will get to a similar score as others on the leader board and then, to avoid a war of escalation, do nothing and hope that the other player(s) do the same (which they often will). Then, at the very end of the tournament, players will make their moves. Since there is no live leader board, players must guess what scores others will have and should typically compensate in varying ways. This tends to lead to disparate scores. That is the opposite of what is consistently observed at TIV. As a reminder, these tournaments extend a full 72 hours. With larger prize pools, later tournaments would commonly have scores 10 times that of early tournaments. Thus, it is not like players are playing similar strategies over a limited window and the scores are a reflection of some players playing slightly more efficiently than others.
Due to size restrictions, the final 2/3's of this posting is to be found attached at www.gamblingforums.com/threads/issues-at-thisisvegas-paradise-8-80-150-revoked.26683/ in the 5th reply at just_Tourneys.txt and a comprehensive list of the relevant tournament leaderboards are next to it.
First, a few notes so you can understand how TIV conducted its tournaments. They operated far outside of industry norms. See if a few alarm bells don't start ringing.
-TIV ran tournaments with advertised prize pools that had routinely reached $500,000 to $1,000,000 per tournament (and still do). Except by emails to existing customers, I am unaware of any meaningful promotion for these tourneys. If you look around on their site, you'll see what I mean. To my knowledge, at face value, TIV runs the largest tournaments/raffles on the internet. Yet, they are labeled as a "rather small casino" by www.sistersitesindex.com.
-TIV had no dedicated link on their website itemizing the rules and details of their tourneys. Emails advertising them failed to establish or reference any T&C and almost always failed to mention there was an entry requirement. Instead, these emails merely established the scoring systems and the face value of the prize pools. Contacting support was necessary for full details.
-For the initial tournaments that I observed, coinciding to a change in management in late 2022, entry requirements were mandated deposits of $500-$1000. This escalated to $3000 within a few months.
-Originally, I received repeated confirmations that the prize pools were cash. Months later, TIV would overrule those confirmations and reestablish prizes that I had already won as non-cashable bonuses. TIV then revoked those bonuses when I escalated a complaint.
-TIV only made tournament results available to participating entrants.
-TIV's tourneys started Mondays at 12:00 am and ended Wednesday night at midnight. Presumably, this would represent the part of the week that their customers would have been most conflicted with work.
-There was no dedicated tournament software and no live leader board. Results were not sent until hours after a tourney ended. A snapshot of each leader board (as it was Tuesday or Wednesday morning around 6:00 am EST) was available upon request.
-When results were published, only scores and the corresponding prizes were published. Those scores were never matched to particular accounts.
-When receiving a prize, any net gain in (balance+pending withdrawals) during the tourney would be deducted from the prize you'd receive. This could lead to receiving no prize at all.
With the above facts in mind, I will now present my evidence. Unless noted otherwise, most of the scoring in the presented tournaments comes from $1 wagered equals 1 point. Maybe 10% of the scoring came from new deposits. The leader boards can be approximated as total wagered. All my available leader boards can be found in a file I've provided a link to at the bottom for reference. I have essentially posted all the early tournaments at TIV since they changed management in 2022. Later leader boards were not made available to me because I stopped playing.
The leader board below, the first I have on record, is a good ambassador of the distribution of scores that typifies TIV's leader boards.
10/14/2022 Final Scores
Place Prize 50K Total points
1 10000 USD 967,753
2 8000 USD 931,441
3 6000 USD 899,887
4 5000 USD 866,784
5 3500 USD 823,042
6 3000 USD 798,772
7 2000 USD 763,802
8 1600 USD 752,991
9 1500 USD 741,901
10 1200 USD 717,559
Here, 1st place, with a prize 8.5 times that of 10th place, has a score only 35% greater. Scores rarely distribute anything close to this at other casinos. By itself, this leader board might be an outlier. However, not once, anywhere in the 11 tournaments I have on record, have I seen a breakaway 1st place score at TIV or even a semi-breakaway score. Elsewhere, they are common. To reinforce this point, there is no live leader board, so players can not strategically herd together. Herding is a common occurrence where players will get to a similar score as others on the leader board and then, to avoid a war of escalation, do nothing and hope that the other player(s) do the same (which they often will). Then, at the very end of the tournament, players will make their moves. Since there is no live leader board, players must guess what scores others will have and should typically compensate in varying ways. This tends to lead to disparate scores. That is the opposite of what is consistently observed at TIV. As a reminder, these tournaments extend a full 72 hours. With larger prize pools, later tournaments would commonly have scores 10 times that of early tournaments. Thus, it is not like players are playing similar strategies over a limited window and the scores are a reflection of some players playing slightly more efficiently than others.
Due to size restrictions, the final 2/3's of this posting is to be found attached at www.gamblingforums.com/threads/issues-at-thisisvegas-paradise-8-80-150-revoked.26683/ in the 5th reply at just_Tourneys.txt and a comprehensive list of the relevant tournament leaderboards are next to it.