Does saltybet run on a microtransaction system? Could he be paying real money for the betting currency? I haven’t thought about that stream in years, I’m surprised it’s still running.
Yes it does... sort of, and Yandev has thrown hundreds of real dollars at it. Possibly more.
How it works is that there is another game that Salty (the sites owner) is working on called "Waifu wars online/WWO" and as a way to promote WWO, players of the game can make Salt (the fake money used on the Saltybet site) by killing bosses in the game. It's not that much for most players, about a million Salt a day is the cap, however there is another system salty has called "Saltycoins". Basically these are $1 micro-transactions that increase the amount of Salt you get from WWO by 2% for each coin - not that much.... unless you hypothetically bought hundreds of them, then you could be making tens of millions per day through WWO.... which is exactly what Yandev has been doing.
If you go to Saltybet and look at the leader-board (
https://www.saltybet.com/bank?all=1&page=1) you'll notice the man himself right at the top! He wasn't even on the first page about a month ago. The only possible way he could have made that much Salt that fast is by throwing hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS at Salty for Saltycoins and increasing his income from WWO by ridiculous amounts. For context, the now 2nd on the leaderboard is a betting bot with around 80% accuracy which has been running for YEARS. And Yandev managed to beat it by simply paying to win.
This has actually caused multiple regular users to leave the site too, claiming that him being at the top just proves how much of a joke the place has become (yes, people take this fake betting shit pretty seriously). He's also regularly called a "fraud" and other similar names in chat, to which he usually pings a mod in the discord/in twitch chat asking them to ban the user.
Also as someone mentioned he is painfully bad at the actual betting. If you have the Salty Illuminati subscription it allows you to see winrates for each mugen character, and he ALWAYS whales (i.e, bets a tonne on thinking it's a free win) on the higher winrate often resulting in him either ruining the odds for others betting or losing a tonne and making himself look a fool.