Why I'm Suspicious This Casino Has Repeatedly Fabricated Tournament Scores
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
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.
Thought I would give an update. TIV has made a bold new threat. They are now threatening to revoke the remaining $31,608 of my balance. The crime? Simply narrating what happened. Here is their exact wording from their response to my review of them on CasinoFreak:
Dear community, We want to express our gratitude for the opportunity to address the matter and share some insights with you. Firstly, in response to the customer's expressed dissatisfaction regarding the engagement of his online posts, we find it peculiar that he chose not to acknowledge the only engagement received for his initial post on the Casino Guru platform. Instead, he references other posts where evidence was not presented. We have become accustomed to such manipulations, as they have been ongoing for over a year. At Casino Guru, each of the customer's claims, defamations, and suspicions has been systematically refuted with supporting evidence. Consequently, it was expected that the forum's management rejected the case upon review. For those interested in a more comprehensive understanding of the customer's character, all relevant information can be found on that forum. While we value constructive criticism and strive to enhance our services based on feedback, it is essential to emphasize that, after more than a year of extensive communication with the customer and numerous attempts to address concerns, we have chosen to strictly adhere to the terms and conditions agreed upon during the account creation process. Communication has been limited to matters solely related to the customer's ongoing withdrawals, due to issues such as continuous threats, falsehoods, and manipulations. Our patience has worn thin, and we now request that the customer promptly remove absolutely all posts containing unfounded suspicions and "hunches" that are tarnishing our reputation with baseless claims. Failure to comply will result in the escalation of this matter in accordance with Clause 11.10 of our terms and conditions, addressing the misuse of accounts. Potential consequences include account termination, winnings confiscation, and denial of services. We appreciate your attention to this matter. Best regards, This is Vegas Support
I have made an extensive debunking of their charges in my GamblingForums post which you can find a link to above. If anybody still has an account at this casino, I strongly suggest you read it.
Thought I would give an update. TIV recently froze off the last $31,608 of my balance. They had previously revoked $80,150. They cited rule 11.10 which allows for "termination of the player's casino account, confiscation of winnings and existing balances...Should at any time the casino discover an active or past complaint/dispute/criticism on a public forum or blog or any other type of website." That is the extent of the relevant content of that rule. They also cited "negativity" and "slander", although they won't specify what that slander is. A quick glance at my post at Gambling Forums will affirm that I have shown them extensive documentation.
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Why I'm Suspicious This Casino Has Repeatedly Fabricated Tournament Scores
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