Posted by In the 1995 movie Casino, the casino director Ace Rothstein (played by Robert De Niro) narrates a story about a high-roller who left his casino with several million dollars of bacarrat winnings. When the gambler tried to leave Las Vegas on the casino airplane, he arranged for a (fake) mechanical problem to prevent the plane from taking off, and he invited the gambler to free room and board until the plane could be “fixed.”
Meanwhile, the gambler returned to the baccarat table out of a combination of boredom and greed. Eventually Ace’s casino recovered most of what it had originally lost to the gambler. As Ace put it:
In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing and to keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose, and in the end, we get it all.
Although Healthy Wage is not a casino, at least in the conventional senses of the term, it wants you to stay around, too. It wants you to keep coming back to play. But unlike most casino games in which the casino has a mathematical advantage that will take all of your money if you play long enough, at Healthy Wage you have ultimate control over whether the money flows toward you or away from you.
Now if you gain weight after your HealthyWager, you cannot launch a subsequent HealthyWager at the higher weight. This is the yo-yo rule: when you win a high-stakes bet like that, you don’t get to back up and plunder the same ground for more dough. Any HealthyWager that paid over $200 (i.e. almost every one of them) triggers the yo-yo rule.
However, the 12-week Individual Jackpot (6% down, what I colloquially call the “mini”) and Team Jackpot (6% version) are available to anyone at any time, even if you are locked out of starting a HealthyWager at your current weight.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The $10,000 Team Challenge is subject to the yo-yo rule and should not be entered if your current weight is above a previous weight-out weight on a HealthyWager.
So while you can’t redo your original weight loss in a new HealthyWager, you can still make money while re-losing that weight. And you can enhance your stake for launching a new HealthyWager if you wish to do that when you arrive again at your weigh-out weight.
So what options are available? This depends on how much weight you need to re-lose, how much time you need to re-lose it, and how much money you wish to invest in this recovery effort.
In the following paragraphs I will use the term “return weight” to refer to the weight you were at when you completed the earlier HealthyWager. This could be your ultimate goal weight, or it could be the launch point for a new HealthyWager.
4% to return weight, or less
Healthy Wage doesn’t have much available for someone wanting to lose 4%. If your return weight is your ultimate goal weight, you can do a DietBet Kickstarter (or three).
But if you intend on launching a new HealthyWager in which you will be losing an additional 10% or more, you can do one or more 12-week 6% individual jackpots (I all them minis) and then launch the HealthyWager in the midst of these as your weight drops to the return weight.
The money you put into the minis will not come back to you until after you drop below return weight, so it will be unavailable for the HealthyWager stake. So you might not want to put too much money into the minis if you are on a budget.
6% to return weight or more
If you need to lose a higher percentage to get back to your return weight—and you need more than 14 weeks to do it—you can invest your stake in minis and get it back with some interest before launching a HealthyWager with it.
It takes 14 weeks for money invested in a mini to come back to you in paid winnings, if you buy into the jackpot on Day 1 of the challenge. The jackpot game itself lasts 12 weeks, with Day 85 being the final day for weigh-outs—but the winnings typically don’t get paid out until Day 99 (14 days after the final day of the challenge—typically two Wednesday’s after a challenge that ends on a Wednesday) or Day 97 (12 days after—typically two Fridays after a jackpot that ends on a Sunday.
About half the entries in the individual jackpot menu at any given moment have $60 fees. I have been in 10 so far that have completed and the average payout is $85.38–about a 42% return on investment.
Another 30% have $100 fees. The 5 I have been in returned $131.87 on average—a 32% ROI.
The remaining 20% have $30 fees. My four returned $49.90 on average. That’s a 66% return on investment.
So if you can wait about 15 weeks to a new HealthyWager, and need to drop about 6% to be in a launch position, you can enroll in anywhere from 1 to 4 minis within a 2 week span, and have the winnings in HW points during the 15th week.
In an average 2-week period, you can expect two $60 minis, one $100 mini, and one $30 mini. If you enroll in all four of these, it will cost you $250. And you can weigh in for each one during weeks 1-2 of your 15-week period, or do a single weigh in in week 2 after the 4th mini starts and apply that weigh-in to all 4 minis.
If you make the 6% goal on all 4, you will be paid winnings on each one, spread across weeks 14 and 15. The winnings will vary, but based on the averages above, you can expect $85.38 for each of the two $60 minis; $131.87 for the $100 mini, and $49.90 for the $30 mini. That’s $352.53 total—your $250 back plus $102.53 in profit at the end of Week 15.
If it’s HealthyWager time at the end of Week 15, and the odds they give you for that are very good, you’ll have the choice of investing that extra $102.53 into the HealthyWager to make more money—or just pocket it. Let’s round that down to $100 profit to stick with nice round numbers. Your return on investment for this venture will be about 40%.
10-12% and 6 months or more to return weight
If you really went backwards, and a longer period and time is required to get into position for a new HealthyWager (or back to goal), you have some more options than before.
If you have $250 to play with, you can invest that in 4 minis as done above to get to about $350 in 3 months.
You can then reinvest the $250 into four more minis—pocketing the $100–and get about $350 back again by the end of month 6. You will then have turned $250 into $450, with $200 total profit. Over 6 months that’s an 80% ROI.
You could also add another $100 mini in the second quarter, instead of merely pocketing the first quarter profit. If the $100 mini pays $130, you will eventually end up with $480 in 6 months, including $280 profit. The ROI for that is about 92%.
If you have more money AND time to bet, you can invest in even more minis. The time restriction is present because there are a limited number of minis per week to bet on. Usually it’s two a week—but at certain high-demand times Healthy Wage will add more minis (early January comes to mind).
So while you could invest many hundreds or even thousands of dollars in minis, you need to spread them out over more and more weeks; and they will only be partially concurrent with each other. You can’t put more than a couple hundred bucks into a single 6% weight loss bid. At least not with Healthy Wage exclusively.
DietBet Transformers: Nearly double your money in 6 months for dropping 10%
If you have $175 and are at least 10% above where you want or need to be, you can turn it into $325 or more in 6 months with a DietBet transformer.
If you have $525 and 6 1/2 months time, and about 12% to lose, you can enroll in 3 transformers, spaced a week apart from each other. With each paying $325 or so, you could finish with $975–or quite possibly $1,000 or more.
Because Healthy Wage and DietBet are separate companies, your bets in one place have no effect on your bets in the other one. So if you have about 6 1/2 months, 12% to lose, and $775 to invest, you could turn all of that into about $1,455 by doing concurrent Heathy Wage minis and DietBet transformers. That’s about 87.7% ROI—and you have a fair shot of getting $1,550, which represents a double on the entire venture:
- Months 1-3: four minis at $250 grow to $350
- Months 4-6; five minis at $350 (the winnings from months 1-3) grow to $480
- Months 1-6.5: three transformers grow from $525 to $975
- $480 + $975 = $1,455
Transformers, of course, are a complex bet. The fees are divided into 6 pots, and you need to weigh in every month to get a claim on each pot. You need to make partial progress each month—if you slack off and try to cram at the end, you’ll lose some of the early rounds; and if you fail to get to 6% down by the end of the 5th month, you’ll be locked out of the last round where most of the prize money is earned. I talk about transformers in detail elsewhere on this blog.
Coda
If you need to lose weight, Healthy Wage and DietBet can monetize it for you in some manner or other, no matter what your history has been with the two services.
DietBet has no yo-yo rule—you can oscillate all you want and keep using them forever. Healthy Wage gives you one big shot at big money, massive weight loss with their Healthy Wager (either serially or all in one go), but you can always play in the mini pools with your fellow players.
Both of them need you and want you. And the money is yours if you can get it. Enjoy the roller coaster ride!
Weight Betting Odds 