Really interesting case and I have a bit of a peripheral personal connection to it.
In 2018, I discovered "21 Blitz" because the aggressive advertising campaign they were running. Basically when ads would pop up on other iOS games, you'd be likely to see several 21 Blitz ads over time. After being inundated with these annoying ads, they got what they wanted, and I tried it.
I actually found the game interesting, and wondered if I had stumbled upon a possible under-the-radar moneymaking opportunity. When I asked around poker and the advantage play communities, nobody really knew much about it. It was clear that the great card players were all in the dark about this thing. Could I use this to my advantage?
I practiced at the free money games and tried to learn the best strategy.
While on the site, I noticed that a few people were constantly dominating the leaderboard. Among them were a guy named "prignum", who usually was consistently on top. A young, pretty girl named "lysnico" was also almost always in the top 5, and often in the top 3.
It was clear that lysnico, prignum, and the other leaders were playing a lot of high stakes ($180 per entry) matches there. I say "high stakes" because each match takes only about 2 minutes, and these people were playing a shitload, plus Skillz was taking 16.67% ($60) rake each time!
Could they really be winning? Or were they just on the leaderboard simply due to high volume? I was dying to talk to one of them about it, but I had no way to reach any of them. As far as I could tell, prignum didn't seem he was involved in poker, nor could I deduce his name. One of my friends told me he played against lysnico on Global Poker, but that she wasn't a regular there.
One day lysnico wandered into the chat room there. I talked to her, and claimed I was the one who had played with her on Global, in order to get her attention. We got into a discussion about poker and other stuff. She claimed to be 19, and the daughter of "two professional poker players", though she wouldn't name them. She swore that her model-like pics were real. Turns out that they were.
https://instagram.com/p/BjLm18Sjmm4/
https://instagram.com/p/BoDSmiflUvv/
More pics: https://www.instagram.com/lyssaball/
I traded some PMs back and forth with her, really hoping she would open up to me about the world of high stakes Skillz 21. Unfortunately, being a pretty young girl on an app like that, she was inundated with PMs, and mine got buried within the countless unsolicited messages she received. We lost contact, and then she vanished from the site shortly thereafter.
Around the same time, I also noticed prignum disappeared, as did many of the other top-placed regulars. Where did everyone go? At the time I blamed it on a combination of rake and the shady, secretive "player matching" algorithm.
See, on 21 Blitz, each person plays a solitaire-like game with a specific shuffled deck, and their opponents also play with that identical deck. That supposedly takes the "chance" element out of it, and makes it legal in certain states. The player with the higher score wins. However, since the players don't always play at the same time, how are they matched? It turns out Skillz only promises that they "won't match two already completed games". Well, that's not much of a promise. They can do plenty of rigging if they want by matching players to others who already completed, depending upon whether Skillz wants the player to win or lose.
In fact, Skillz admits they match people together "based upon skill", but they claim they do this for "fairness", which is of course BS. In reality, they want to rake the maximum.
But back to lysnico. What happened to her? Why did she vanish? Why did prignum vanish? I'll continue in my next post...
