winter is coming....

And it's still a long time until Game of Thrones continues :-(

But first it's christmas session and a lot of skill gaming and gambling sites are giving away bonusses and free plays. So make sure you check your inbox to not miss any opportunities. I'm going to check king.com again for the first time in 6 months to enjoy the free game each day of december.

On a related note, the wizard of odds currently runs a game on his forum at wizard of vegas with a total prize pool of $200 for free. It's 10 rounds of Golden Balls with a 20 players in total. I was lucky enough to be one of the players. Basically each one on one round is a kind of Prisoner's dilemma. Each player can choose to "share" or "steal" against his opponent. If both share each receive half of the money of this round. If both try to steal than the money goes back to the wizard. In the event that just one player selects to steal he'll receive the whole money for this round.
I'm going to reinvest all the money I win into a contest/game here. I'm not sure what it's going to be so feel free to make suggestions. Right now it's either a game of diplomacy online between the first people to comment. Or a guessing game about the number of comments.

If you have any other ideas for a good game to distribute the money feel free to leave a comment!

PS: I'll write a post about the Golden Balls game at wizard of vegas and my strategy after it's finished.

PPS: There is a new browser game that you might want to check out:

Free money from skill game sites

I already mentioned in a previous post that I like to play games for fun and money. Now it's time to compare two of the leading websites in terms of free money. Yes, they offer freerolls if you are a real money player there. I have accounts on three major sites:

* king.com
* gameduell.de
* worldwinner.com

I don't play on worldwinner anymore because I didn't like the fact that you can only play there when using Internet Explorer. Because it didn't offer any special games and take about the same fee as the other sites I stopped playing there. So I'll only compare the free money offers of king.com and gameduell.de.

king.com

Each day there are a couple of freerolls of the same game. All this tournemants start at a fixed time and are open for 2 hours. So you have to logon at the right time to take part in them. Usually the price pool is 50€ or 100€. On weekends there are three additional freerolls lasting from Friday to Sunday. Those also have bigger prices. The problem with all those offers is that you always have to compete against thousands of other players. You have to be really good at the specific game to win even cents (not even mentioning making the top ten and getting a few euros/dollars). Over the last two month I made exactly 3 cents from those free games while playing about 15 of them. *thumbs down*

gameduell.de

At this site it's a lot easier to win free money. Each day you can play against the 'Joker' to win 50 cents. Every day you have to play a different game but this opponent isn't so hard. I never practiced before my free game and won about 45% of them. The game is available all day so you can logon any time you want to. Of course there are no big wins possible but if you login anyway it's free money. And it's easy to get.
Over the last two month I made 16.50 € from those free games while playing about 45 of them. *thumbs up*

conclusion

No matter where you play free money is always nice...even if it's just cents. I wouldn't really bother to check into king.com everyday to check if they offer a game i'm good at. And I miss them way too often. Logging into gameduell once a day and playing a different game fits into my schedule :-)

Do you also play on any of this skill game sites or do you know another ?

Stealing on and offline

BLR technologies cheats at online craps

According to a post from the wizard of odds and other sources BLR technologies is cheating at their online craps game. The win rate over a sample of 328 rolls was only 24.7% (while it should be 49.29% for betting on the pass line). This expectation for such a event over this sample size is 1 in 3,940,183,270,432,190,000. So if you don't like losing (even more than you normally should expect to) don't play at online casinos using the BLR technologies software. This includes the following casinos:

• Legends Sports
• World Wide Wagering

And the second news is from the offline world but also features being robbed:

6000 copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 stolen

The demand for this new game seems to be quite high. On their way to retailers two different trucks with the game have been stopped and robbed of their delivery. The first delivery was crashed by a robbed car and as soon as the drivers wanted to check out the damage they were robbed be masked gangsters.
About one hour later a second truck was stopped by a parked car and armed robbers stole their load too. A total damage of about 800.000€. And lots and lots of unhappy gamers who now have to wait even longer until they receive their copy of their game.
But the bad guys should be pretty issue to spot when 6000 origin accounts send their data to the homebase ;-)

So if you what to be safe from online cheating, spyware and brutal force in real life make sure to buy Skyrim. The latest release of The elder scrolls series (aka the reason why I went to gamescom 2011).

Back from gamescom 2011

I am back from the gamescom 2011 in Cologne, Germany. The final numbers are not out yet but it seems that the gamescom had another record year. A total of 550 different companys and agencies had stands. I have to admit I didn't count them but it were a whole lot of them. Including the major distributors (Blizzard, EA, Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft,...) and console creators (sony, nintendo, microsoft) showing off their latest products.
Especially Blizzard and EA had huge stands and stages which seem to occupy a third of one of the halls each. Too bad that they choose to hide there latest titels inside their stands which meant that you had to get in line to see anything. For a peek at Battlefield 3 (EA) there was a line so long you had to wait 6 hours to get inside.


A gimplse through the exit door revealed that the lucky guys got to play a bit but I'm not sure for how long. My personal guess....Not worth six hours waiting.
The same can be said about Modern Warfare3 (Activision) and Diablo 3 (Blizzard). And sadly my own private favorite that I wanted to see: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (Bethesda). All had hours of waiting which frankly I did not sacrifice. I'm not sure if this was clever marketing by the big guys. Sure you can only give a few people the opportunity to actually test a game but showing so little to the masses seems like a bad move to me.
Sony did a good job to use the current hype about minecraft to promote their new Xperia Play. They had youtube 'celebs' Lewis and Simon sign funny little block heads from minecraft.


Not sure if it really help Sony to advertise for their new mobile gaming plattform but it sure looked like fun and spread the word even further about minecraft (if that's even possible).
My personal highlight was playing Jagged Alliance - Online and talking to one of the developers. It's really amazing what can be done with browser games today. It looks great, all movements are smooth and controls are simple. If you put it into full screen you won't notice it's a browser game. The game itself is free to play and is financed by premium content so it's worth a try.
Next year I need to make sure to go to gamescom on a day which is not open to the public. Not seeing anything of the big games was really frustrating.

Oh, last but not least I've got a gift code for the first to grab it. It's for another online game called Wizard101 which is also free to play. With this code you get 5000 gold coins and a special pet/ride to use for 7 days. So however uses it have fun with it and please leave a comment so others know that the code is already taken.
And the code is: 7NP57-42CJ-9DLD-UMJO