Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: August 2, 2026

Everything below is how Ganbate actually works. Where the honest answer is "we don't do that yet", it says so. If you find something on this page that does not match what the site does, that is a bug — email [email protected] and I will fix it.

Jump to: The basics · Coins · Buying coins and refunds · Fairness and odds · Your account · Playing · Rules, limits, and taking a break · Who built this

The basics

Is Ganbate real gambling?

No. Nothing of monetary value can be won here, and no real-money wager is ever taken.

Ganbate is a social casino: real casino games, played with coins that are play money. Coins have no cash value. You cannot win money, and there is no prize of value anywhere on the site. Money can come in — if you choose to buy coins — but nothing ever comes back out.

That is not a feature we are apologising for. It is the entire point of the product.

Can I win real money?

No. Never, by design.

Coins are the only thing you can win, and coins are not money. Winning a big Crash multiplier gets you more coins. More coins get you more play. That is the whole loop, and it ends there.

Can I cash out, withdraw, or redeem my coins?

No. There is no withdrawal feature, no cash-out feature, and no redemption feature. None exists in the product, and none is planned.

One phrase causes confusion, so let's kill it now. Some games have a Cash Out button — Crash, Mines, Tower, HiLo, Chicken. Inside a game that only ever means end the round and put the coins back in your balance. It has never meant, and cannot mean, turning coins into money.

Then why would anyone buy coins?

To keep playing right now instead of waiting.

That is the honest answer, and it is the only one. A coin pack buys you time at the table this evening. It does not buy you an asset, a balance you can get back, or a chance at a payout — there is no payout. You are buying entertainment, the way you buy a game or a cinema ticket.

You never have to buy anything. Free coins are always available, permanently, and everything a coin pack gives you is something you could eventually get for free. If you play here for a year without spending a dollar, you are a completely normal, welcome player. That is what the ads are for.

Do I have to pay to play?

No, and you never will. See the next section.

Coins

How do I get free coins?

Four ways, all built in:

The daily claim is deliberately capped: it unlocks only while you are below 50,000 coins. If you are sitting on a big balance, it stays locked until you have actually spent down. The refusal message says so plainly rather than pretending the button is broken.

Watching ads is always optional. Every other source in that table is available without watching anything, so you never have to trade attention for coins.

What happens if I run out?

You are never stuck at zero. That is what Rescue is for: drop below 200 coins and you can claim 200 more, once an hour, three times a day. Between that, the daily claim, and rewarded ads, there is always a free path back to the table.

Running out is not a wall. It is a pause.

What can I spend coins on?

Bets, and cosmetics — chat name colours (500 to 10,000 coins) and avatar frames (2,000 to 25,000 coins).

Cosmetics are the only coin sink besides betting, and they are pure vanity: a colour and a ring. Nothing you can buy with coins touches odds, limits, or how anything plays. Buying one destroys the coins — they do not come back, and cosmetics cannot be sold, traded, refunded, or turned back into coins.

Can I send, gift, tip, or trade coins?

No. There is no gift, tip, trade, or transfer feature anywhere in the product. The system has no way to represent one, and we will never build one.

The only route by which coins ever pass between two players is winning a poker pot — which is exactly why poker is raked, and exactly why we watch it for chip dumping (see below).

Can I sell my coins or my account?

No — and trying to is one of the fastest ways to lose everything.

Offering to buy or sell coins or accounts, brokering such a deal, advertising one, or arranging one anywhere (on Ganbate or off it) is grounds for immediate and permanent account termination, with all coins forfeited. Asking is enough. "Anyone selling coins?" is a bannable message.

Deliberately losing at poker to move coins to another player — chip dumping — is the same offence. We can see the net coin flow between any two players who have shared a table, and a large, lopsided, one-way flow is exactly what we go looking for.

This is not us being precious about a rule. Coins having no cash value is the entire reason Ganbate is a game and not gambling. Someone who gives coins a cash value is not just breaking a rule — they are attacking the thing that lets everyone else play here safely.

Buying coins and refunds

What do coin packs cost?

Cards only. Payments run through Stripe, on Stripe's own hosted checkout page — Ganbate never sees or stores your card number. There is no crypto checkout: the gateway code exists but is switched off for launch, and a crypto request is rejected outright by the server (Crypto payments are not available yet.).

Is there a limit on how much I can buy?

Yes: $200 per rolling 24 hours, for everyone, always. It is enforced on the server, it counts purchases still in flight, and you cannot raise it.

That is a deliberate ceiling on how much anyone can spend here in a bad night. It is a responsible-play control, not a number we are trying to grow.

Can I get a refund?

Sometimes — and the rule is narrow. It is stated the same way everywhere it appears:

A coin purchase is refundable only if ALL of the following are true: (a) the request is made within 14 days of purchase, and (b) NO wagers/bets have been placed on the account since that purchase, and (c) the purchased coins remain unspent in the balance. Otherwise the purchase is FINAL and non-refundable.

All three conditions, every time. Some specifics, because they catch people out:

• Condition (b) means any bet, of any size, in any game. One 100-coin dice roll after your purchase makes that purchase final. It does not matter whether you won or lost, or whether you bet the coins you bought or coins you already had.
• Condition (c) means unspent, not merely un-wagered. Buying a 500-coin chat flair is spending. It defeats the refund just as a bet does.

To request one, email [email protected] from the address on your account with your username and the rough date and amount. A person checks it against your coin ledger by hand — there is no self-service refund button, so please do not expect an instant answer. If it does not qualify, we will tell you which condition failed.

Your statutory rights come first. If you are a consumer in the EU, EEA, or UK you have a 14-day right of withdrawal on digital content — that is a right to cancel the purchase and get your money back, not a right to withdraw coins, which remains impossible. Where mandatory consumer law gives you more than this policy does, that law wins. The full rules, with worked examples, are in the Virtual Currency & Purchase Terms.

Please don't file a chargeback. Email us first — almost everything is fixable that way. Reversing a purchase you asked for, received, and possibly already played is a breach of the terms, and it results in account termination and forfeiture of your entire balance regardless of who wins the dispute. If a charge genuinely was not made by you, that is different — tell your bank, that is what the mechanism is for.

What happens to my coins if I close my account, or if Ganbate shuts down?

They are gone, and there is nothing to refund — because there was never any cash value to refund. Zero coins and a million coins are worth exactly the same amount of money: none.

If Ganbate ever shuts down, your coins stop existing and you are not compensated. We would stop selling coin packs and post notice first, so nobody buys coins they will not get to use, but notice is not compensation. Treat every coin purchase as money spent on entertainment you consume immediately. If you are not comfortable with that, do not buy coins — the free coins are always there.

Fairness and odds

Are the games rigged?

No — and you do not have to take my word for it, which is the entire point.

Every game is provably fair. Before you bet, the server commits to a secret server seed by publishing its SHA-256 hash. It cannot swap the seed afterwards, because any other seed produces a different hash. Every outcome is then derived by a fixed, public function — HMAC-SHA256(serverSeed, "clientSeed:nonce:cursor") — where the client seed is yours to set and the nonce counts up with every bet. When you rotate your seed pair, the old server seed is revealed to you, and you can recompute every round you played under it and check it against the hash you were shown before you played.

In the multi-step games — Mines, Tower, Chicken, HiLo, Blackjack, Video Poker — the entire hidden layout is fixed at round start. Every mine position, every bomb column, the whole deck order. Your clicks reveal what was already decided; they do not create it. The board cannot react to you.

→ Check the maths yourself at /fairness — public, no account needed, runs entirely in your browser.

How do I actually check a result?

1. Before you play, note the serverSeedHash on /fairness. That is the commitment.
2. Play.
3. Rotate your seed pair. This reveals the server seed you were playing under.
4. Open /bets. Every instant bet you made under the retired seed now shows the revealed server seed, the client seed, the nonce and the committed hash — with a one-click Verify link that opens the verifier with all of it pre-filled. You do not have to have written anything down. (Not every game is in this list — see the limits below.)
5. Check the two things that matter: that the revealed seed hashes to the commitment from step 1, and that recomputing the outcome reproduces what you were paid on.

Step 4's hash check proves we did not swap the seed. The recomputation proves the seed produces the result we showed you. Together they close the loop. /verify covers all sixteen games, is public, needs no account, and runs entirely client-side — nothing you type into it is sent to us.

If a commitment ever fails to match, stop and email [email protected]. That would be a serious bug and I want to know immediately.

What are the catches? Be honest.

Fair enough. A fairness page that omits its own limits is marketing, so:

• Your bet history does not cover every game. The eight instant games — Dice, Limbo, Keno, Plinko, Wheel, RPS, War, Baccarat — appear on /bets with their seeds, nonce, committed hash and a one-click Verify link, and so now do the six multi-step rounds (Mines, Tower, Chicken, HiLo, Blackjack, Video Poker) once they settle. They were missing for a while, stored on a separate table the history query did not read; that was a gap, not a design, and it is closed. (Crash and Poker are still absent, but for a different reason: neither is rolled from your personal seed pair, so there is no nonce of yours to show. Both are verified at the table instead — see the Poker and Crash bullets below.)
• You cannot bind your client seed to an existing commitment. The only way to set a client seed is to rotate, and rotation generates the new server seed in the same call — so the server sees your seed before it commits to its own. Grinding for a favourable seed would be expensive, detectable and something I am not doing, but "I am not doing it" is exactly the sentence provable fairness exists to make unnecessary. Treat your client seed as entropy you contribute, not a commitment you extract from me. It is the highest-priority fix on the fairness page.
• Poker hands cannot be re-derived after the fact. The shuffle proof is shown at the table when the hand ends and is not stored afterwards. Poker is verifiable at the table and not later.
• Crash takes no player entropy. Each Crash round has its own server seed and the whole table shares it, so you do not contribute a client seed to it. Its guarantee is narrower: it proves the round was fixed before betting closed, not that you influenced it.
• In poker, the client seed is the table ID and the nonce is the hand number — not values you choose.
• Verification proves the roll was honest. It does not prove the roll was good for you. Every game has a house edge, and over time the maths favours the house. That is disclosed, not hidden — see below.

The full, exact specification, including a dependency-free reference verifier that shares no code with Ganbate, is on the Provably Fair page.

What is the house edge?

Published, per game — with one number I have not computed, and I say below exactly which. The dice are honest; the payouts are what give the house an edge. Both things are true at once, and that is the normal arrangement in every casino that has ever existed.

The full table, per game and per bet type, is at /house-edge. The short version:

About 1% on a single bet, because the edge is a constant in the payout formula. Limbo, Rock-Paper-Scissors, War and Wheels (every risk, every segment count) are all exactly 1.00%. Dice is 1.01%, because a roll landing exactly on your target loses. Mines is 1.00% wherever you stop — charged once, not per tile — rising to 1.72% on a few low-multiplier setups where the payout rounding bites.

Tower, Chicken and HiLo charge ~1% on every step, and the steps compound. This is the number most likely to mislead you, so it gets said plainly: the edge is not charged once per round. A full nine-row Tower climb has played against 8.7%, not 1%. A Chicken that crosses all twenty lanes has played against 18.3%. Ten HiLo guesses in a row cost 9.6% (1 − 0.99ⁿ). Stopping early is not a trick — it is how those games stay cheap.

Crash — worse the lower your target. 1.89% at 1.10×, 1.49% at 2.00×, easing toward 1.00% only at very high targets. A cash-out at your target pays only if the round crashes above it, never at it, and that gap is where the extra edge lives.

Keno and Plinko pay from fixed tables. The return sits close to 99% and shifts a little with your settings — pick count for Keno (0.96%–1.04%), risk and rows for Plinko (0.88%–1.09%).

Baccarat — Player pays 2.00×, Banker pays 1.95× (the standard 5% commission), Tie pays 9.00×. The Tie bet is the worst wager on the site: a 15.7% edge. It looks generous and it is not. The four pair side bets are priced to this single deck at ~1% — do not assume the 11:1 and 25:1 you know from an eight-deck table apply here, because they did not: those are the prices Ganbate shipped with, they were badly wrong on one deck, and repricing them is one of the two errata recorded on the odds page (see below). The two bonus bets are the expensive ones: P Bonus 3.0%, B Bonus 9.7%.

Blackjack — six-deck shoe, dealer stands on all 17s, blackjack pays 3:2, with the full standard ruleset: split any pair (up to three hands, split aces take one card), double after split, late surrender, insurance. The main game's return depends on how well you play, but the optimal-play figure is now computed exactly, by dynamic programming over the full game tree: 99.6622% RTP — a 0.3378% edge, the cheapest bet on the site. Play worse and it costs more; nothing bounds how much more. Insurance is the exception hiding inside the cheapest game: it costs 7.40% and optimal play never takes it. The two side bets settle on the deal and do not care how you play the hand, so they enumerate exactly over the six-deck shoe: Perfect Pairs costs 6.11% (93.89% RTP) and 21+3 costs 4.62% (95.38% RTP). All three are several times the ~1% the rest of this site charges. Bet them for the fun of them, not for value.

Video Poker — Jacks or Better on a fixed 9/6 table (full house 9×, flush 6×). Play every draw perfectly and you get back 98.37% — a 1.63% edge, computed by enumerating every deal, hold and draw, not simulated. Play worse and you get less; a player who never discards gets back about 34%. One caveat, because the name promises more than this table pays: the ~99.5% usually quoted for "9/6 Jacks or Better" assumes a five-coin royal bonus that lifts the royal to 800×. There is no such bonus here — the royal pays a flat 250× at any stake, and that missing bonus is the whole difference. The optional double-up gamble is exactly even (0% edge) — the hidden candidates are symmetric, so no picking strategy beats it.

Poker is not a house game. You are playing other players, not us; see the rake question below.

Have any of these numbers ever been wrong?

Yes. Two of them, and writing the odds page is what found them. Both are fixed in the code now, and both are still described in full on /house-edge — a page that quietly deletes its own errata is not one you should trust with the numbers that matter.

• The wheel's medium risk ran at a 2% edge — double the rest of the casino — because its multipliers summed to 980 instead of 990, at every segment count. The layout now sums to 990, and a test pins every wheel layout (each risk, each segment count) to exactly 1%. It slipped through because the old test only checked that the return landed somewhere between 95% and 99%, a band roomy enough to hide a 2% edge.
• Baccarat's four pair side bets were priced for an eight-deck table and were badly wrong on Ganbate's single deck, where those events are far more likely. Three ran brutally against the player (a 29%–32% edge), and perfect pair ran at 100.92% RTP — an edge against the house, which anyone betting it was quietly printing coins on. All four are now repriced to ~1% and pinned by a test that enumerates every opening deal.

Neither is live today. If you played either game before they were fixed, that is what you were playing, and I would rather you heard it here.

What is Edge Rebate?

A daily allowance during which the 1% house edge is refunded into your payout (payout × 100⁄99).

• Qualifying bets: single-bet games at 1,000 coins or less per bet — Dice, Limbo, Keno, Plinko, RPS, War, Wheels, Baccarat.
• Daily allowance: up to 50,000 coins of qualifying action per day. Resets at midnight UTC.
• Not included: the multi-step games (Mines, Tower, HiLo, Chicken, Blackjack, Video Poker), Crash, and Poker. They keep their standard edge.

Being precise about exactly where the rebate lands: on the games built to exactly 1% — Limbo, RPS, War, Wheels — it takes the edge to a true zero. Everywhere else it removes one percentage point and can leave a sliver behind. Dice keeps its extra 0.01%. Keno, Plinko and Baccarat pay from fixed tables, so their return lands near 100%, not exactly on it. And it does not rescue a bad bet: a Baccarat tie is a 15.7% wager with one point knocked off it, which is still the worst bet on the site. Rounding always drops the leftover fraction of a coin on the house's side, too. It is a genuine giveaway, not a perpetual-motion machine — and it exists because we can afford to be generous with money that isn't real.

Edge Rebate changes the payout, never the outcome. The same seed and nonce produce the same roll whether or not the bet qualified, so verification is completely unaffected.

Does the house take a cut of poker?

Yes: 10% of each pot, capped at 50 coins. No flop, no drop — an unraked hand costs nothing. Tournaments rake at payout instead.

The rake exists for a specific reason. A poker pot is the one legitimate way coins can move from one player to another, which makes it the one channel a chip dumper could use. The rake makes every pass cost 10%, and it gives the ledger a clean signal to watch.

Your account

Do I need an account?

Not to look around. Guests can browse the lobby, open every game, read chat, and use the fairness verifier without signing in — and you will see a demo balance that cannot be wagered.

You need an account to do three things: place a bet, post in chat, and sit at a poker table. Try any of those as a guest and the sign-in box opens instead.

How do I sign up?

One email address is enough. No long form, no card, no ID, and nothing to prove but the address itself.

The sign-in box offers whichever methods are switched on — an email and a password, and, where it is enabled, a 6-digit code emailed to you instead of a password. Whatever it shows you, the requirement behind it is the same: a working email address. Your 50,000 signup coins land in the wallet the moment it is created.

How do I close my account?

Settings → Danger Zone → Delete Account. You get a 30-day grace period to change your mind. After that the account is deleted, and your wallet, coin balance, bet history, purchase records, and chat messages go with it.

Two things worth knowing before you do it:

• Unused coins are forfeited, and there is nothing to refund. Coins have no cash value, so an unused balance has no cash value either. Closing an account while holding a huge balance does not create a claim against us of any kind.
• If you want a refund, ask for it before you close the account. Refunds are not available on a closed account.

Can I get a copy of my data?

Yes — you can request a data export from your settings, and the Privacy Policy sets out the rest of your rights, including under GDPR and CCPA/CPRA. If anything there is unclear, email [email protected].

Playing

What games are there?

Sixteen, all live, all playable with free coins, all provably fair.

Card games — Poker, Blackjack, Baccarat, War, HiLo, Video Poker

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

Am I playing poker against real people?

Real people. Every seat at a live poker table is a real player.

House bots exist in the code — heuristic players that wear a BOT badge and whose usernames end in -bot — but they are a development and testing tool only and are never cast at live tables. So if you are playing poker here, the Coins in the pot are other players', not the house's. (If that ever changes, this answer changes with it, in the same breath.)

The tables are No-Limit Hold'em: cash games at three stake levels plus a Run-It-Twice table, and two sit-and-go tournaments. You are playing the other seats, not the house.

Is chat moderated?

Yes — but be honest with yourself about what that means.

Moderation is done by a person, after the fact. There is no automatic profanity filter and no automatic link filtering. Something vile can sit in the room for a while before I see it. That does not make it allowed, and it does mean the room stays clean partly because the people in it report things.

What is enforced automatically, for everyone, all the time:

• 200 characters per message, and blank messages are rejected.
• One message every 2 seconds.
• Text only. No images, no files, no embeds — and no way to attach coins to a message. There is no tipping and no coin transfer, by design.
• The feed shows the last 50 messages.

Hate speech, slurs, harassment, threats, doxxing, sexual content, scams, advertising, and any offer to buy or sell coins or accounts get messages removed and accounts actioned. Muting, locking, and permanent termination are all on the table, and serious breaches skip straight to the end of that list.

A warning about links: any URL you see in chat was typed by a player and has not been checked by anyone. Do not open them.

To report something, there is no button in the room — email [email protected], use support chat if you are signed in, or the contact form if you are not. Include the username, roughly when, and what was said. There is also no way to block or ignore another player from your own view; if someone is targeting you, report them rather than trying to handle it in the room. The full rules are in the Community Guidelines, and they are part of the Terms of Service.

Is there an app?

On any phone: yes, right now. Ganbate is an installable web app (a PWA) — open ganbate.io in your browser and use "Add to Home Screen" / "Install". It runs full-screen, like an app, with no store required.

There is no native app on any store yet — no Android app, no iOS app. The way to install Ganbate on a phone today is the PWA above. A native app is planned; if that changes, this page will say so and link it.

Rules, limits, and taking a break

Who can play?

You must be 18 or over. Ganbate is not available to residents of Washington State, USA, or anywhere else it may not lawfully be offered.

Be clear about what that is: a rule you agree to, not a check you pass. There is no ID check, no age-verification step and no identity check of any kind anywhere on Ganbate — you confirm you are 18 or over and I take you at your word. Washington is excluded the same way: by policy, not by a technical block on the door. I would rather tell you that plainly than let a rule sound like a lock.

None of which makes it optional. Signing up in breach of it breaks the Terms of Service, and the account gets closed when it comes to light. If you are under 18, this is not for you — and there is nothing here worth money anyway.

I want to set limits, or take a break

The two betting controls — the loss limit and self-exclusion — are enforced on the server inside the same locked transaction that moves the coins, so a bet that breaches one is refused rather than merely discouraged. Self-exclusion and the purchase cap are checked again at the checkout, so they block buying as well. The reality check is the one that is only a prompt. It is worth knowing which is which, so the list says so.

• Daily loss limit — a rolling 24-hour cap on how much you can lose. Betting stops when you hit it. Enforced server-side, at the moment the coins move.
• Self-exclusion — pause yourself for 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or permanently. You type "EXCLUDE ME" to confirm, and once set it cannot be undone for its duration.

It stops the money, not just the betting. Every bet is refused for the whole duration, and so is the till: while an exclusion is active the server refuses to open a checkout, and nothing is charged. Both refusals happen on the server, not in the browser. An exclusion that stopped your play but still took your payment would be a safety control in name only — it would be taking money from the one person who has told me they need to stop.

If a charge ever does land while your exclusion is active, that is a bug. Email me and I will refund it in full and remove the coins, regardless of the 14-day rule.

Self-exclusion does not log you out or remove you from chat. If you want to be away from chat too, email me and I will mute or lock the account for you.

• Cooling-off on loosening a limit — tightening applies instantly. Raising or removing a limit takes 72 hours. Your calmer self gets a veto over your 2 a.m. self.
• Purchase cap — $200 per rolling 24 hours, for everyone, always. Enforced at checkout, on the server.
• Reality check — every hour you are playing, a box appears telling you how long you have been at it. It cannot be dismissed for the first three seconds. It is a prompt, not a lock: it tells you the time and then lets you carry on. That pause is the whole feature.

→ Set your limits at /responsible-play — the controls are attached to your account, so you have to be signed in to open it. Nothing on this page needs an account, and neither do the helplines below.

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

Even though nothing here is worth money, the loop is still the loop. If you are worried about gambling generally, these people are good and they are free: National Problem Gambling Helpline (US) 1-800-GAMBLER · Gamblers Anonymous · GamCare (UK) 0808 8020 133.

Who built this

Abraham Ahn. One person, in California. Ganbate is a sole proprietorship — not a corporation, not a studio, not a team behind a stock photo.

I built it because I got tired of online betting sites I could not verify, and because I lost real money on them. I still like the games. I did not like the part that quietly takes money people cannot afford to lose. So: keep the games, cut the harm. What is left is a casino where the only thing at stake is pride.

Here is the version of that argument I actually believe, including the uncomfortable part. It would be easy to tell you a play-money casino has no reason to cheat. That is not quite true: Ganbate sells coin packs, so in principle a dishonest operator could tune the odds to drain balances faster and sell more of them. You should not have to take my word for it, even here. That is exactly why every round is provably fair and every house edge is published — including the two I got wrong, which stay on the record as errata rather than quiet edits. Every game's optimal-play return is now computed exactly, and the numbers on these pages are generated from the same constants the games settle with, so a page cannot quietly disagree with the code. The question of whether I am honest should be one you can answer with a hash function instead of a guess.

The bugs are mine, the roadmap is mine, and when you email support, you are emailing me.

How do I get help?

[email protected] — support, bugs, refunds, reports, appeals, privacy, press. It all arrives in the same inbox. Signed in, you can also use support chat; signed out, the contact form.

It is one person, not a support team. I read everything and reply as soon as I can, but it may take a few days. I would rather tell you that than promise you a response time I cannot keep.

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

About · Provably Fair · Verify a bet · Your bets · Odds & House Edge · How Coins work · Responsible Play · Terms of Service · Privacy Policy · Community Guidelines · Contact · Complaints · Accessibility

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.

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