I signed up to try out OLG’s new PlayOLG.ca website because I often see and hear advertisements about their new site. This is my review of their website.
Registering on the site was fairly straight forward and as you register, you are presented with options to limit your transactions to self-regulate your spending on the site. To test this, I set the limit to $30 per week, which means I can’t deposit more than $30 per week.
Mobile devices don’t work on the site at all. While I can understand that the flash slot and poker games won’t work on mobile phones, it would not have taken much to ensure that the ability to purchase lotto tickets was possible.
Once logged in you are presented with the available games to play and you can even “play for free”, which uses fake dollars to play with. I played a whole bunch of the slots, and the most interesting thing that happened is after I played all of them, I spent an imaginary $150,000 and only made $28,000 on an actual win, despite the caption on the right indicating a 94.9% payback rate. Well, with those odds and burning through $150,000 in 20 minutes doesn’t jive. It’s the timing on the wins that matters and the 94.9% payback rate appears to be based on whether or not you win, not how much you get back, you can spend $400 on a spin, but only win $50. It’s very deceptive.
After I registered, I setup as much information as possible and attempted to deposit funds into the account to purchase lotto tickets for the draw that night instead of going to the store. I tried the credit card avenue first, however after several attempts, and double checking the the card number, I received, “An error occurred, please contact support or try again later.” I did this a couple times and the same thing happened. I checked my credit card and confirmed that it should allow for the transaction, but something on their end prevented that. Next, I decided to attempt to deposit funds via banking, I got a similar error message via the banking site that my account was not setup to do allow this kind of transaction, however when I logged in and checked my settings, it should have gone through. I went back to the olg site to try again, but it said my weekly deposit limit had been reached and could not deposit any more funds. I’m not sure about you, but I believe 0+0 = 0, not 30. I sent a message to the support team, and all they did was cite the methods to deposit funds and that the deposit limit was adjusted to 30 before the transaction was made until it cleared, but since it didn’t clear the limit sat at 30. With the amount of difficulty that I encountered, who knows how many people have encountered the same problems… People who need to use the self-imposed limits to curb any addiction to the site are going to revert to no limit and defeat the purpose of it.
I tried to find out how much they spent on the development of the website, but I couldn’t find any references to that, but I anticipate it’s around $100M. Hardly worth the investment I think, plus I think it’s socially irresponsible to put the deceptive slot games on there.
I requested that they delete my account, since it was not possible for me to use their site.
For what it’s worth, I DO NOT RECOMMEND using the playolg website, it’s a deceptive sham that’s going to put alot of people out and revenue only in OLG’s pocket.
This forum thread, while it’s still up, cited that playing regular BlackJack he couldn’t quite put his finger on a strange thing that happened, alluding that PlayOLGs system is rigged.