About Ganbate

がんばって

The name is Japanese. Ganbatte — it is what you say to someone right before they step up to do something hard. It means: do your best. Give it everything. Go for it.

What it does not mean is win. It is encouragement about effort, not outcome. You can lose and still have done your best.

That is the joke, and it is also the whole point. Ganbate is a casino where the only thing on the line is your pride — and it turns out that is exactly the condition under which playing well starts to matter.

What this is

Ganbate is a free-to-play, provably fair social casino. Sixteen real casino games — poker, blackjack, baccarat, crash, mines, dice, all of it — played with coins, which are play money.

Real games. Real odds. Real math. Nothing you can win or lose at the table is money.

The important part, stated plainly:

Coins have no cash value. They cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, redeemed, converted to money, transferred, gifted, sold, or traded. There is no prize of monetary value anywhere on this site. There is no withdrawal function — not a locked one, not a coming-soon one. It does not exist in the code.

So no bet you place here can cost you money, and no bet you win can pay you any. The only money that ever changes hands is a coin purchase, if you choose to make one — and that money buys coins, permanently. It does not come back out as winnings. (A purchase can be refunded under the rule below, which reverses the sale; that is a refund, not a withdrawal, and it is the only path by which money returns to your card.)

One clarification, because the words appear on screen: Crash, Mines, Tower, HiLo and Chicken have a Cash Out button. Inside a round that means stop now and put the coins back into your balance. It has never meant, and cannot mean, turning coins into money.

So no real-money gambling happens here. There is no cash prize at the end of it, and no losses to chase back.

You never have to spend anything, either. Free coins are always available — the daily claim, the rescue top-up, rewarded ads — so paying is optional, permanently.

Why I built it this way

Casino games are good games. That is the uncomfortable thing this industry rarely says out loud, and the thing its critics have to explain away. The tension of a Crash curve you have not collected on yet. The moment you decide the next Mines tile is fine, actually. The small arithmetic of a Blackjack double. Nobody fell for these games by accident — they are centuries of refinement in making a single decision feel like it matters.

The problem was never the games. The problem is what they are usually bolted to: a mechanism that is extremely good at separating people from money they cannot afford to lose.

So: keep the games, cut the harm. That is the entire thesis. Take a casino, remove the part that ruins lives, and see what is left standing. I am betting that what is left is the part that was worth having.

This is why the coins cannot be cashed out, and why I am not apologising for it. It is not a limitation I am working around — it is the feature. No bet placed here can lose you money, because the coins are not money. The losing streak that empties a balance costs you nothing but the balance.

I want to be exact about the limit of that claim rather than let it round up into something nicer. It does not mean nobody can spend too much here. You can buy coin packs with real money, and money spent on coins does not come back once they are played. That is a real spend and it deserves a real ceiling, which is why purchases are capped at $200 per rolling 24 hours for everyone, and why the free routes back to the table exist at all. What is gone is the mechanism that does the serious damage elsewhere: the one where the game itself keeps reaching into your bank account, and chasing losses means spending more to win money back. There is no money to win back here. Everything else on this page is downstream of that.

You should still not have to take my word for it

Here is where I have to be careful, because there is an easy lie available to me and I would rather not tell it.

The easy lie is: a play-money casino has no reason to cheat. It sounds true. It is not quite true. Ganbate sells coin packs. An operator in my position could quietly tune the odds so that balances drain faster, and sell more packs that way. The incentive is smaller than a real-money casino's. It is not zero. If I told you it was zero, you would be right to close the tab.

So I did the other thing instead. Every round is provably fair — you can recompute it yourself, without trusting me — and the odds are written down below, including the two I got wrong.

Provably fair means: before you bet, the server commits to a secret server seed by publishing its SHA-256 hash. It cannot change that seed afterwards without the hash failing to match. Every outcome is then derived from HMAC-SHA256(serverSeed, clientSeed:nonce:cursor) — and the client seed is yours, so I cannot steer the result on my own either. Rotate your seed pair whenever you like: rotating retires the current server seed, reveals it to you, and issues a fresh commitment. At that point you can recompute every round that seed produced and check it against the hash you were shown before you ever placed a bet.

The verifier runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and you do not need an account to use it — that part is deliberate, because a fairness proof you have to sign up for is not much of a proof.

→ How it works: /fairness · Verify a round: /verify

On the odds. Most of the games are built to a 1% house edge, and I mean that literally — the code multiplies by 0.99, and that is the whole of it. RPS, War and Wheels land on exactly that. Dice, Limbo and Mines use the same multiplication and then land a fraction of a point above 1%, where a tie rule or integer truncation bites: Dice is 1.01% at every target, because a roll exactly equal to your target loses. Limbo is 1.00% up to about 100× and 1.01% past it. Mines charges its 1% once for the whole round rather than per tile — so where you stop does not change the price, with one exception I would rather state than bury: on a few small multipliers, truncation pushes it as high as 1.72%. Keno and Plinko run off fixed paytables rather than a multiplication: Keno's run 1.00% – 1.04%, Plinko's 1.00% – 1.09% — generated from the paytables themselves, because the hand-typed versions of these two numbers had already drifted false once.

Four places where it is not a flat 1%, which are exactly the places a page like this normally goes quiet. Tower, Chicken and HiLo charge the 1% at every step rather than once per round, so it compounds the further you push: a full nine-row Tower climb costs about 8.7%, not 1%. Crash is worse the lower your cash-out target: 1.97% at 1.01×, 1.89% at 1.10×, 1.49% at 2.00×, reaching 1% only far up the curve — and 1.98% of rounds bust instantly at 1.00×, before anyone can cash out at all. The card games — Blackjack, Baccarat, Video Poker — land wherever their paytables put them, which is not a single number I can honestly reduce to one figure here; Baccarat's tie bet is the worst wager on the site at 15.7%, and its banker bonus is 9.7%. And the Blackjack side bets are the expensive corner of the felt: Perfect Pairs costs 6.1% and 21+3 costs 4.6% — the standard six-deck paytables, several times what the hand in front of them costs.

Every one of those numbers, per game and per bet type, is published: /house-edge. That page also carries the two errors writing it turned up. A Wheels layout was silently running at 2% — double every other game — while the file's own comment claimed 1%. And the four baccarat pair side bets, inherited from an eight-deck table, were badly wrong on a single deck: three of them priced 29–32% against the player, and one running at a negative house edge, quietly paying out more than it took in.

Both are fixed, and both are now nailed down by a test rather than by my good intentions: every one of the nine wheel layouts is pinned to an exact 0.99, and the repriced pairs are checked against all 1,624,350 opening deals a single deck can produce. Neither can drift back without the build failing. Both are still described on that page, because an odds page that deletes its own errata is not one you should trust.

Poker is not against the house at all: it is player against player, and I take 10% of the pot, capped at 50 coins — and only on hands that reach a flop. In tournaments the same 10%, capped the same way, comes out of the prize pool when it is paid.

There is also Edge Rebate — a daily allowance where that 1% is simply refunded back into your payout. Bets up to 1,000 coins qualify, up to 50,000 coins of action per day, reset at midnight UTC. It does not cover the multi-step games, Crash, or Poker. Generosity is cheap when the coins are not money.

(Poker's shuffle uses its own commit-reveal scheme — same principle, different encoding, because shuffling 52 cards is a different problem than rolling a die.)

Who I am

I am Abraham Ahn. One person, in California. Sole proprietor — not a company, not a studio, not an About page with a stock photo of a team.

I built all of it: the games, the fairness engine, the poker table, the payment plumbing, the art, and this page.

I built it because I got tired of betting sites I could not verify, and because I lost real money on them. I could not check whether the games were straight. I had to take somebody's word for it, and I had no particular reason to.

Let me be precise, because it would be easy and cheap to imply more than I know: I am not accusing anyone of rigging anything. I cannot prove that and I am not going to say it. What I can tell you is that I could not check — and that being unable to check, while losing money you would rather keep, is a bad place to stand. It is also where most players are standing.

So I built the casino I wanted to play on: free, honest about its math, checkable by anyone, and good enough to come back to. If it works, nobody has to trust me. That is the design goal, and it is the reason for every decision above.

How Ganbate makes money

Two ways, and only two.

1. Coin packs. Card payments run through Stripe, on Stripe's own checkout page — I never see or store your card details.
2. Ads. Google AdSense, including the rewarded ads that pay you coins for watching them.

That is the whole business. Cosmetics are bought with coins, not dollars. Nothing else on this site charges money.

Note what is not on that list: the house edge is not revenue. Not one dollar reaches me when a coin bet loses. The edge exists to drain play coins so the economy does not inflate into meaninglessness. It is a game-balance mechanic, not a till.

I will not pretend the two are hermetically sealed, though, because you would be right not to believe that either. The edge is a sink. A sink is what eventually runs a balance low. And a low balance is one of the reasons somebody buys a pack or watches an ad. That is the honest shape of a free-to-play economy, and you should be able to see it plainly rather than have me insist the games and the store have nothing to do with each other. What I can tell you is that the free routes back to the table are real and permanent — and that if you play here for a year on free coins and never spend a dollar, you are a completely normal, entirely welcome user. That is what the ads are for.

The free coins

• 50,000 coins to start, when you make an account.
• 1,000 coins every 24 hours from the daily claim — any time your balance is below 50,000.
• 200 coins from the rescue top-up, any time your balance is under 200 coins: up to three a day, once an hour. Nobody should be stuck at zero.
• 200 coins per rewarded ad, up to ten a day.

The coin packs

Purchases are capped at $200 per rolling 24 hours, for everyone, always. It is enforced on the server, and purchases still in flight count against it. It is a deliberate ceiling on how much anyone can spend here in a bad night, not a number I am looking for reasons to raise.

Refunds. A coin purchase is refundable only if requested within 14 days, and no wagers have been placed on the account since that purchase, and the purchased coins remain unspent. Condition two means any bet, of any size, in any game. Condition three means unspent — and buying a cosmetic with coins is spending them, so it closes the window just as a bet does. Otherwise it is final.

Refunds are decided by hand. There is no automatic refund button in the product: a request arrives in the same inbox as everything else, and if it qualifies the charge is reversed through Stripe and the coins come back off the balance. Where mandatory consumer law gives you more than that — the EU/UK right of withdrawal on digital content, for instance — the law wins; see the Terms.

And once more, since it is the sentence people skim: buying coins buys entertainment, not value. Outside that refund rule, the money does not come back — and no amount of winning will bring it back, because winning pays coins and coins are not money. If a way out was what you were hoping for, this is the wrong site, and I would rather you close the tab now than discover it later.

The games

Sixteen, all live today.

Card games — Poker (No-Limit Hold'em at a shared table), Blackjack, Baccarat, War, HiLo, Video Poker.

Originals — Dice, Plinko, Crash, Keno, Mines, Chicken, Tower, Wheels, RPS, Limbo.

One honest note about Poker, since "against real players" invites a fair question: the tables seat real people, and they can also seat house bots. Every bot wears a BOT badge at the table, always. If a seat is not badged, it is a person.

Knowing when to stop

Even with play money, the loop is the loop. So the controls are real: every one that stops money moving is enforced on the server — inside the same locked transaction that moves the coins, not as a suggestion you can click past.

• Self-exclusion — 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or permanent. Once set, it cannot be undone for its duration. It closes the coin store as well as the tables: while an exclusion is active, no purchase can go through. A control that stopped the play but still took the money would be worse than none.
• Daily loss limit — a rolling 24-hour cap. Betting stops when you reach it.
• Cooling-off on limits — tightening one takes effect instantly. Raising or removing one takes 72 hours. Your calmer self gets a veto over your 2 a.m. self.
• Reality check — an hourly note of how long you have been playing, which you cannot dismiss for the first three seconds. This one is the exception: it is a nudge in the browser, not a lock on the server. It is the only control here that stops nothing.
• Purchase cap — $200 per rolling 24 hours.

→ Set your limits: /responsible-play

If it ever stops being fun, that is the signal. Take the 24-hour exclusion. It will still be here afterwards.

Who can play

You must be 18 or over to hold an account. Ganbate is not available to residents of Washington State, and is unavailable elsewhere as the law requires.

I would rather be exact about what actually enforces those two sentences, because the word "must" is very good at implying a gate.

Age is not checked at all. There is no age-verification step, no ID upload, no document check, nothing. You confirm you are 18 or over when you open the account, and I take you at your word. That is a rule, not a check, and the responsibility for it sits with you.

Location is checked, but only coarsely. Requests are gated on the region my CDN reports for your IP, and Washington State is on the blocked list by default: a request from there is refused rather than served. But an IP is a guess about a place, not a fact about a person. A VPN defeats it. And when no location comes back at all — no CDN header, an unplaceable address, Tor — nothing is blocked and the request goes through. So the gate is real, and it is nowhere near a proof; your signup confirmation is what it ultimately rests on.

If you are under 18, or you are a Washington resident, or you are somewhere this is not offered, you are not permitted to play here — whether or not the gate happens to catch you.

Getting in touch

[email protected] — support, bugs, refunds, privacy requests, press. It all arrives in the same inbox.

It is one person reading that inbox. I read everything, and I reply as soon as I can, but it may take a few days. That is the honest expectation, not a service commitment — there is no target response time and no support desk behind the address, and I would rather say so than let the word "support" imply one.

That inbox is the best way to reach me. Ganbate is also on Instagram (@ganbate.io), X (@ganbateio), Telegram (ganbateio), and Discord — the links are in the footer. Those are the only accounts I run; if you find something else wearing this name, it is not me, and support and anything that needs an answer still belong in the inbox above.

Provably Fair · Verify a round · Your bets · Odds & House Edge · How Coins work · FAQ · Responsible Play · Terms · Privacy · Contact · Complaints · Accessibility

Ganbate is operated by Abraham Ahn, sole proprietor, Abraham Ahn, 5013 S Louise Ave, Unit #972, Sioux Falls, SD 57108, USA. Contact: [email protected].

Ganbate is a free-to-play social casino for adults 18+. Coins have no cash value. They cannot be withdrawn, cashed out, redeemed, transferred between players, gifted, sold, or traded. There are no prizes of monetary value. No real-money gambling takes place on this site, and no purchase is necessary to play.

Play your best. がんばって.