Gambling

Provided a game of Mafia is large enough, dead players can gamble together in order to earn each other's points. Bets are placed on factions, and the players who bet for the winning faction will receive the bets placed on the other factions.

Placing a bet

After you die, you can place your bets during the morning rounds. You do this using:

!bet POINTS FACTION

Where FACTION is innocents, mafia, monsters or camorra.

Whenever you place a bet, you will immediately pay the part of the amount of your bet that corresponds to the gambling tax. This amount will be lost forever. The tax depends on the current game day:

Day	1	2	3	4	5	6
Tax	10%	25%	40%	55%	70%	85%

So for example, betting 10 points on day 2, you'll pay 3 points as tax. The idea is to penalize and discourage betting after the first few days, because the later we are in the game, the easier it is to predict its outcome. The remaining amount of points from your bet will be added to the book as your real bet - in the same example, 7 points.

To see how many points you currently have, your current accumulated real bet and the current tax for the placement of new bets, use simply:

!bet

You can bet again on the *same* faction any amount of times in the current or subsequent mornings. However, you can't revoke your bet, and you can't bet on multiple different factions. There is also a cap on betting of 50 points and 10% of your total points.

You can also look at the current odds (based on placed bets) using:

!odds

Winning a bet

Bets are resolved when the game ends. If the game never ends (due to a crash or being stopped by an operator) or ends in a draw, bets are not resolved and no player gets or loses any points. Otherwise, all players pay their bets at this time, even if they are offline. To ensure fairness, no player who is gambling can buy anything until his bets are resolved.

After bets are paid, the winners are determined. Specifically, the winners are those who bet on the victorious faction and are online. All the players who leave forfeit their bets, becoming automatically losers (it is ok to bet, leave and return, as long as you're back before the end of the game).

The winner's share of the cake depends on his accumulated real bet when compared to the total bets of all the winners.

For example, let's imagine the following scenario:

Player	Real Bet
Lazygamer	10 points on the innocents
Terran	30 points on the innocents
Protected	20 points on the innocents	left before the end of the game!
Edward	35 points on the mafia
The innocents win the game.

The total 'cake' is 95 points. The winners are Lazygamer and Terran. Because Lazygamer only bet 1/3 of what Terran bet, he'll only get 1/3 of Terran's earnings. so Terran earns 95 * 75% = 71 points, and Lazygamer earns the remaining 24 points. Terran risked more, but he made a profit of 41 points, while Lazygamer only made a profit of 14 points. Protected and Edward lost the entirety of their bets.

In addition, all players had to pay the gambling tax earlier when they placed their bets (see Placing a bet). Assuming for the sake of simplicity that everyone placed their bets on day 2 (which won't usually be the norm), everyone paid 25% in tax - So their bets had actually been 40, 13, 27 and 47 points respectively. Terran's net profit was then 31 points, still a very significant amount, and Lazygamer's was 11, a moderate amount.

If we imagine that Lazygamer had died of AIDS in the first night (night 0) but neglected to place his bet immediately in the following morning, his net profit could have been 1 point higher if he had done so, because for 13 points and a day 1 tax of 10%, his real bet would have been 11 points instead of 10. For a higher bet, like Terran's, the advantage of betting earlier is even greater - Terran would have paid only 4 points in tax instead of 10, netting him an extra 6 points.

See also

• Gambling strategy