Stake Dice: how it works, odds and settings

Stake Dice is one of the original in-house games on Stake and the simplest to understand. Each bet produces a random number between 0.00 and 100.00. Before you bet, you choose a target and whether the roll must land over or under it. Your win chance is the size of the winning range, and the payout multiplier is set from that chance.

There are no reels, cards or bonus rounds. You control one number — how likely you want to win — and the game does the rest. That transparency is why Dice is a useful place to learn how house edge, variance and bet sizing interact before you try anything more complicated, such as Limbo or Mines.

To play you need a working Stake address. If the usual domain is blocked or slow on your network, the live mirror list shows working ones with response times measured in your browser.

1. Enter a bet amount. The ½ and 2× buttons halve or double it.
2. Set the odds. Drag the slider, or type into one of three linked fields: Multiplier, Roll Over/Under (the target) and Win Chance. Change one and the other two update.
3. Choose the side. Clicking the Roll Over/Under field flips between rolling over and rolling under the target. The win chance stays the same; only the winning range moves to the other end of the scale.
4. Click Bet. The roll appears on the slider. If it lands in the green range you win your stake times the multiplier; if it lands in the red range you lose the stake.

The Profit on Win box shows exactly what a winning bet returns on top of your stake, so you can check the result before you click.

Every Stake Dice multiplier comes from one formula:

Multiplier = 99 ÷ win chance (%)

A perfectly fair game would use 100 instead of 99. The difference is the house edge: 1% of everything you wager, on average, over a very large number of bets. It applies to every setting equally, which is why changing the odds changes your risk but not your expected return.

The last column never changes: on average, each $10 bet returns $9.90 whatever odds you choose. What changes is variance — how far your results swing around that average. At 98% you win almost every roll but tiny amounts, and one loss wipes out about fifty wins. At 1% you lose most rolls and occasionally win big.

Why 2× needs 49.5%, not 50%

At a 50% chance the multiplier is 1.98×, not 2×. To get an even-money 2× payout you have to set the chance to 49.5%. The missing half a percent is the house edge, visible in a single setting.

Short-term luck versus the edge

Over 1,000 bets of $1 at 2×, the expected loss is about $10. But the typical swing either side of that over 1,000 bets is around $30. In other words, over a session the result is dominated by luck, and the edge only becomes visible across many thousands of bets. That is why a winning night proves nothing about a method, and a losing one does not mean the game is rigged.

The Auto tab repeats bets for you using rules you set in advance:

• Number of Bets. How many rolls to make. Zero usually means run until stopped or until a stop condition hits.
• On Win. Either reset to your base bet or increase the next bet by a percentage.
• On Loss. The same choice after a losing roll. This is where progression systems such as Martingale are set up — and where balances get emptied fastest.
• Stop on Profit. Ends the run once your total profit for the run reaches a figure.
• Stop on Loss. Ends the run once your total loss for the run reaches a figure.

Auto-bet is a convenience, not an edge. It can be useful for keeping bet sizes consistent, but it also places hundreds of bets a minute, which means you wager far more per hour than you would by hand. With a 1% edge, expected losses grow in line with the amount wagered. Always set Stop on Loss before you start, and keep the On Loss increase at zero unless you have done the arithmetic below.

Martingale (double after a loss)

You bet at 2× (49.5%) and double after every loss, so one win recovers all previous losses plus one base bet. The catch is the losing streak. At 49.5%, ten losses in a row happen about once every 900 sequences — rare per sequence, but over a session of 1,000 rolls there is roughly a 40% chance of seeing at least one streak of ten. By then your next bet is 1,024 times your base bet, and you have already lost 1,023 base bets. Table limits or your balance end the system before the streak does.

Reverse Martingale (double after a win)

You let wins ride and reset after a loss. This limits losses to one base bet at a time but rarely completes a long run of wins. Its expected return is the same 99%.

High-chance grinding

Setting 90%+ and betting large feels safe because you win almost every roll. It is not safer in expected terms: the edge is still 1% of turnover, and one loss at 98% costs as much as roughly fifty wins.

Low-chance hunting

Betting tiny amounts at 1% or less for a big hit. Long losing runs are normal: at a 1% chance, going 300 rolls without a win happens about 5% of the time.

"Hot" numbers and switching sides

Each roll is independent and determined by the provably fair seeds, so past rolls tell you nothing. Flipping between over and under has no effect on your odds.

The honest summary: no betting pattern changes a 1% house edge. Methods only change the shape of your results — many small wins and rare big losses, or the reverse.

Stake Dice is provably fair, meaning you can check after the fact that a result was fixed before you bet and not changed afterwards.

1. Before you bet, Stake shows a hashed (encrypted) version of its server seed. You also have a client seed, which you can change to any text you like, and a nonce, a counter that goes up by one with each bet.
2. Each roll is calculated from those three values with a published cryptographic function (HMAC-SHA256), turned into a number between 0.00 and 100.00.
3. When you rotate your seed pair in the Fairness settings, Stake reveals the old unhashed server seed. You can hash it yourself to confirm it matches what you were shown, and recompute any past roll using Stake's documented method or an independent verifier.

Changing your client seed regularly is good practice: it means even Stake could not have chosen a server seed with your future client seed in mind. Our glossary explains seed, nonce and hash in more detail.

• Set a session budget in your balance, not your head. Use Stake's Vault to set aside money you do not intend to play with.
• Size bets as a small fraction of the session budget. At 2×, betting 1% of your budget per roll gives you a long session; betting 10% does not.
• Decide your stop points before you start, and enter them in Stop on Profit and Stop on Loss.
• Watch turnover, not just results. Fast auto-bet at small stakes can wager more per hour than slow manual play at larger stakes.
• Treat wins as luck, not proof. A system that "worked" for a night was variance.

If a session stops being fun, stop. Stake's deposit limits, cool-off periods and self-exclusion are explained on our responsible gambling page.