Fairness

Nothing turns on chance

Every game on FLIP is decided by what the players do. There is no deal, no spin and no draw that decides a result.

In a live game, such as Trivia, each player receives the same question at the same moment, before anyone can act on it. In Crowd, every player answers the same questions, and nobody can see how anyone else answered while the competition is open.

The server is the only authority

Your device draws the screen. It does not decide anything.

The server holds the state, validates every action against the rules before applying it, and sends each player only what they are entitled to know at that moment. A player never receives information they should not have. In a game with a set answer, such as Trivia, you are not sent the correct answer until scoring, because your device is never told. In Crowd there is no set answer to leak: results are worked out on the server from every entry after entries close.

A modified client can therefore misbehave, but it cannot cheat the app itself: an action the rules do not allow is refused, and information that was never sent, including an answer before scoring, cannot be read out of the app.

What server authority cannot see is a player reaching outside the app for help. A live game is built so that does not pay: questions are timed tightly enough to reward recall over a search, using another person, device or source to answer is against the rules, and answer patterns that suggest outside help are reviewed.

How the prize is worked out

Every player in a contest pays the same entry fee, which FLIP sets, and some contests are free to enter. The prizes are provided and paid by FLIP from its own funds, fixed and published before the contest, and awarded to the top finishers by rank. They do not depend on the number of entries or the fees collected. What you can win is shown before you enter.

Placing follows the rules of the game, and those rules are published before you play. In Trivia, places are decided by the number of correct answers and how quickly each was given. In Crowd, they are decided by how popular your picks were, then by how close your estimates of their popularity came to the real share, then by whoever locked in their entry first. In every case, the record of the event is what settles them.

The standings you see and the result that pays out are produced from the same record of the contest, so what settles a place and what is paid cannot drift apart.

Prizes are awarded on final placing, and a placing found on review to rest on cheating is set aside, so the prize passes to the next eligible player.

A contest that cannot be completed is voided, every entry fee is returned in full, and nothing is retained. FLIP earns from contests that happened, not from contests that failed.

Where a result is ever in question, our record of the contest is the authority. Our determination of a result is final; the terms of use set out how we review a disputed contest.

Where the money sits

Balances are derived from a double-entry ledger rather than stored as a number and edited. An entry fee is taken when you enter and returned in full only if the contest is voided or cancelled. Prizes are never paid from entry fees and never land in a coin balance: a cash prize is paid to you by bank transfer, directly by the FLIP team.

Every entry is append-only, so a correction is a reversing entry and never an edit, and every transaction must balance to zero, which the database enforces rather than the application. A nightly check reconciles the ledger against the balances it produces.