Today, we’re going to talk about “fixed” gambling – no, not fixed as in a sports contest where the outcome is decided in advance. We’re talking fixed as in fixed odds, one of the growing trends in online gambling.

All forms of betting are based on the player wagering on a specific outcome of some future event. It could be a sporting match, with bets placed on who will win, by how much, or even what the total points will be. Or you could bet on whether Thomas will ever be able to calculate how long it takes a car to go 80 miles when travelling at 80 Miles per Hour?

You place your bet and get paid according to the line. Very simple. In casino games in brick-and-mortar settings, it’s all about the game rules and probability. You have 52 cards in a deck, or 37 spots on the Roulette wheel, and you are paid based on the probability that you achieve your desired outcome.

Our highly moral online industry has developed the RNG – the Random Number Generator – a software program that ensures that numbers that are drawn are indeed random. One of our clients has explained this quite nicely. You can read all about it on our client’s website or you can actually expand your horizon and read about the popular (and fun!) MD5 algorithm. Yes, I know, it’s the month’s end, and you are very busy CRM executives. With the limited time you have to dedicate to your competition analysis report, you will diligently review links to subjects such as the Contest at the Palms Casino. Yes, of course – repeated reviews may be necessary to fully comprehend the topic. We understand.

Putting our clothes back on and returning to the topic at hand, fixed odds gaming amounts to a table of “tickets” – that is, indexed values with pre-determined results. In a fixed odds algorithm, the only thing that is random is the act of choosing the ticket. All winnings, profits and payouts are determined PRIOR to the game – hence its name, “Fixed Odds”.

For example, you might have a batch of one million tickets, each priced at $1. When the first game is played, the computer picks the first event from the batch and checks whether the first ticket was a winner or not. That cycle is repeated until the batch of one million tickets is depleted.

The pre-determined payout ratio could be anything, but for the sake of the discussion let’s make it 90%, meaning that the total value of all prizes will be $900,000. And then let’s further assume that the odds will be set at 1 in 3, meaning that 333,333 tickets will have a positive value (winning tickets) and the rest, 666,667 tickets will have a negative value (a multiplier of 0).

Here is the sweet bit: To allocate prizes according to the wager/risk/ bet, you simply have a batch per amount. So if a player decides to play for $5, his tickets will be pulled from batch #1. If he plays for 50 cents, his tickets will be pulled another batch. ME LIKE.

A well-known offline version of this mechanism is, of course, those stupid scratch cards that are purchased by even stupider people on the street: “Here’s your batch of cards, with pre-determined winning combinations already in the pack. You might be lucky enough to get a winner, or you could actually do something with your life, like watch paint dry.”

That said, people continue to buy these cards, probably from super-smart other people, like those running the national lotteries that have operating turnovers all of us online experts can only dream of. Speaking of being stupid (sorry Thomas), it seems like we have a lot to learn from these guys.

Boring, you think? In the digital version, these winning sessions can be presented in all sort of forms, starting with virtual scratch cards, and ending with slots machines, operated on the same basic rule – each handle pull is yet another event off the batch.

And don’t forget, unlike any RNG based operation, here you won’t have any “challenging days.” That is to say, there won’t be any unpredictable surges of winners that you have to pay. :) Nice, eh?

Of course, the problem is that you can’t run the big-draw table games such as blackjack and roulette based on this system. But assuming you already have these on your platform, the fixed odds games are potentially a good way to broaden your brand’s financial base. It’s a bit like adding a steady bond payout to your portfolio of stocks.  In a future blog post, we’ll look more closely at the financial management involved with these various games.

Any of this makes sense, or is it like Indian to you guys?