First of all, let me first say that I am not trying to instigate a coup against our, ‘Dearest Leader,’ the Royal Panda. Although, I am a little bit amused by the naming of the Royal Panda online casino and am not sure what it is supposed to represent. Does the Royal Panda live in a castle with scantily clad female pandas catering to its every whim as they hand feed the Royal Panda bamboo that first must be tested by the Taster Panda to ensure that it has not been poisoned or otherwise tampered with?
Do visitors to the Royal Panda have to smite themselves before his grace and lick his paws before either making their request of his Royalness or begging forgiveness for whatever actions they have taken that have been viewed in an unfavorable light by his black-and-white Lordship?
Okay, I’m done, I promise.
The Royal Panda Casino, as it were, is currently running a few promotions in support of their newly introduced live table games, and I am here to dissect whether or not those promotions are beatable as well as some of their other promotional offerings. Let us first take a look at the welcome bonus:
The Welcome Bonus:
This welcome bonus is an extremely simple $100 Deposit Match on any new player who deposits $100 into the casino. While there may be some fringe ways to engage in bets with enough variance to beat this promotion, they would likely only be slightly profitable and are not worth analyzing due to a couple restrictions on betting that the casino has in place.
The first of these restrictions is that players may only bet a maximum of $7.50 using bonus money which, as a result, prevents any way of obtaining an easy mathematical advantage by which a player could improve his bonus amount sufficiently enough to playthrough the rest of the requirement on a game with a low house edge by way of slow-playing.
However, even though that is the case, I do applaud the Royal Panda for having enough respect for his loyal peasantry to include these rules in a very upfront way in the terms and conditions. There are many other online casinos that prohibit a vague notion of, ‘Bet structuring,’ or otherwise have provisions against, ‘Professional play.’ The notions of bet structuring and professional play are both specious and arbitrary, in my opinion, unless the casino directly provides some indicator of what precisely would violate those terms. Fortunately for all of us, and anyone else who actually takes the time to read and understand the materials, his Lordship Bear has done this in a very clear way. You can’t bet more than $7.50, and there are also a few individual slot titles (I smell high variance!) upon which no more than $1.50 may be bet.
The bonus has a playthrough requirement of 35x the bonus amount (but, based on the way I understood what I read, not the deposit) so a player depositing $100 would have to make $3,500 in bets on anything other than table games or slots which count 10% towards the wagering requirements, and therefore, $35,000 must be made in total bets.
Based on the expected losses (100% - RTP * Amount Bet) of all the games that appear to be available on the site to me, I can easily conclude that the bonus is not beatable straight up due to the fact that the bonus itself is not cashable. If the bonus were cashable, then the bonus would be quite beatable, but the $140 expected loss on the best table and/or video poker game available is too much to overcome.
Again, by betting as much as they will allow, there might be some way to overcome the house edge and enjoy an expected profit using a high variance bet such as betting the maximum allowed on roulette, or perhaps some slot game that allows you to bet a ton on a single line, with the goal being to improve the bankroll in a manner quick enough such that by scaling down one’s bets to reduce the variance one has a very high probability of winning and is expected to do so.
I have analyzed better promotions than this both here and on WizardofVegas.com articles, and those editorials and articles are available to everyone interested in looking for them. If you need, send me a private message and I will link you to some of them. These articles will give you the tools you will need to determine whether the expected profit on this promotion both exists and if it is worth your time.
Unfortunately, I can immediately determine it is not worth my time. However, YOU are worth my time, so if you attempt to find a way to beat this promotion and have any questions about your procedure for determining whether or not it can be beaten, feel free to shoot me a private message.
LCB also has a special promotion in this regard by which the player will receive a $150 bonus on a $100 deposit. While that is certainly better on the surface, the increase in the wagering requirements correspondingly increases the expected loss on the playthrough of the best table game or video poker game available (one of the blackjack variants) to $210. The effect of that is that the player is expected to lose $20 more taking this offer than the player is expected to lose simply sticking to the 100% deposit match. However, this is probably a more attractive option for slot players and players of other high variance games as it presents a better chance of a lucky hit enabling a playthrough grind out and profit.
Free Spins, Can You Win?
For those of you who prefer no-deposit bonuses and their effective equivalents, we report that Royal Panda is offering ten free spins as a promotion for individuals who use our LCB click through. The free spins are, as the word implies, absolutely free so there is no money that can be lost.
Unfortunately, any result of the free spins is going to be subject to that 35x playthrough as well as the maximum permissible bet limits on bonus money. Furthermore, that playthrough shall remain 350x for table games and video poker. Since there is no game that does not present an expected loss (overall) on the bonus playthrough, then the player is, quite simply, not expected to win on this promotion. However, due to variance, some players will win. Furthermore, I think that the welcome bonus might be bad enough that one would do well to take the free spins (if you really feel like it) and see what happens.
The Blackjack Promotion:
That brings us to the current Blackjack Promotion by which the first five players to get dealt three consecutive blackjacks shall be awarded $1,000 in the event they claim such event to customer service. This adds all kinds of value to the blackjack game, although, the rules for their live blackjack game were not listed online so I made my assumptions based upon their worst RTP video blackjack game.
If you would like to see the math on this one in full detail, though I admit I had to make a TON of assumptions as, given that I am in the United States I couldn’t create an account even if I wanted to, then as soon as my companion article is posted on WizardofVegas.com, I will link to said article in the comments.
The ultimate result is that, based on 100 hands per hour (though maybe it doesn’t go that fast) the ultimate result of this promotion is right around a buck an hour after factoring in the expected loss on the base game. If you have more insight than I do on how many hands of live dealer blackjack can actually be played in an hour, then simply base your assumptions off of $1.00/hour (my math was based on assumptions and a $5 minimum bet anyway) and then take whatever percentage of hands your estimate is compared to 100 and that shall be the rough guesstimate of hourly profit. To wit, if you think there are fifty hands per hour, then that is fifty percent and the profit per hour is roughly $0.50.
I will echo my sentiments from the other article that, if you are going to play blackjack anyway, then this promotion is worth doing simply because you have a slightly positive expectation whereas you would normally have a negative expectation. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, it’s better than nothing, but if you have anything that you could be doing that might earn you more than $20-something in a 24 hour period, then that thing would be a better use of your time.
The Roulette Promotion:
This promotion is called, ‘Hail to the King,’ which also answers the question of exactly what type of Royalty our Royal Panda is. For all I knew, the Royal Panda could have been an emperor, prince, princess or a duke if the dukes of panda kingdom were required to be of royal blood, as was the case in early England, so there are no words that can adequately express how happy I am to have this cleared up. The Panda, as it were, is a king, King Panda.
This roulette promotion features King Panda, in all of his regal glory, making a special appearance at the roulette table thirty-five times during the week. This occasion is most special indeed, because how rare is it that one can join a king in his court, much less gamble with him? When RoyalPanda appears in the chatbox, as he will thirty-five times throughout the week, the first player to say, ‘Hail to the king!’ will be rewarded the knightly sum of $100. However, much more importantly, you will have greeted your beloved king in a manner befitting a dignitary such as yourself.
The main stipulation for this promotion is that the roulette player must have made one bet within the five minutes preceding the appearance of King Panda. I also assumed this was on double-zero roulette because, again, can’t create an account and live dealer has no play for fun mode. For the sake of argument, I assumed that the player could bet only once every five minutes with computer perfection, and furthermore, that the player was the only one at the table. Ultimately, I concluded that the player would expect to make $17.68/hour under those conditions provided he gives a shout out to King P. (if I may) at every opportunity.
Of course, there is going to be more than one player playing roulette at any given time, at least, I assume so or our Dearest King Panda will have to reevaluate whether or not giving away the royal jewels is advisable. If there are two players, and both players type equally fast, then the expected profit per hour drops to:
((3500/2)/168) - (530.21/168) = $7.26/hour (rounded)
The more players, the less value, though value will be gained or lost in an unquantifiable way by whoever has the awareness to know that the KIng has entered the room and to get the message out.
For those of you interested, the number of players (again, assuming they are all equally skilled at typing) at which an expected loss becomes the case, betting perfectly, is a mere seven. With seven players, the player expects to lose almost $0.18/hour.
Conclusion:
The promotions at the Royal Panda are sufficient to make blackjack slightly advantageous, but not so much so that I would go out of my way to play the promotion unless I really liked online blackjack anyway, which I don’t. However, if any of you out there are playing negative expectation blackjack, then it may be time to give Royal Panda a chance. However, I would periodically check to make sure not all five prizes had been claimed yet. The good news is that you will still enjoy the same advantage as the other players until all of those five awards has been hit, but there’s no way to know whether or not it will happen to you.
I do not know how many people are playing live roulette at one time, but if it is more than six, then you are still looking at a negative expectation game there that I would be inclined to avoid.
Finally, I don’t think any of their regular promotions are easily beatable, and even if they were, the profit margins would be so small that it wouldn’t be worth the time it takes to grind out the playthrough in a low variance way. I do applaud the casino, however, for directly stating in their terms and conditions what is or is not allowed.
One policy that I don’t like is that bets are made with your cash balance and only defer to your bonus balance if that cash balance is exhausted. What that means is that, with the welcome bonus, not only are you expected to lose, but you are basically expected to lose the full $100. Furthermore, bets made using your bonus balance (when the cash is gone) do not contribute anything at all to the playthrough and that only begins to happen anytime you are wagering from a positive cash balance.
Final Conclusion:
Yawn. Unless you like blackjack anyway.
