After five busts in a row, the big multiplier is not "due"

What do the "easy money" videos promise?

On 20 October 2026, a thread on the r/ScamCenter forum — "Chicken road to get money very easy is a scam?" — described phone videos and apps promising easy money from Chicken Road; two replies confirmed the scam. It is the third event of its kind logged by our trend watch in six days: on 16 October, a wave of fraudulent clones (fake notifications, impersonation) around the same game; on 18 October, a French-language comment denouncing a "grosse arnaque" around blocked withdrawals. The commercial engine of all three episodes is the same: the easy-money promise. And its playable form — the one "predictor" content sells — is a single mechanic: watch for the low rounds, then place the bet at the moment the big multiplier is supposedly about to "land". In other words, the streak is said to call the jackpot.

That promise is precise, therefore measurable. This page tests its arithmetic — not its popularity, for which no census exists and none is claimed here.

After a run of busts, does the next round pay better?

No. In this study, a round's outcome is its bust multiplier, and a "low" round is one that stops below 1.50x (the 2.00x threshold is published as a sensitivity check in the full file). The documented model of these games — RTP (theoretical return to player, i.e. the share of stakes returned to players over a very large number of rounds) of 98% — draws every round independently of the ones before it: theory therefore predicts the streak changes nothing. The million rounds confirm it, across the whole ladder:

Reading: at every streak length — 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 low rounds, at both thresholds tested — the next round's distribution is the same as in ordinary times, within the sampling error published beside every share in the downloadable file. The round after a long low streak is neither better nor worse: it is new. That is exactly what "independence of rounds" means — and it is the property the "due" promise has to deny in order to exist.

How long do you actually wait for a big multiplier?

Longer than the videos show. For a multiplier of 10x or more, the median wait between two occurrences is 7 rounds — but the 99th percentile is 45 rounds, and the longest wait in the million rounds is 118. For a multiplier of 100x or more — the one in the "easy money" videos' screenshots — the median wait rises to 71 rounds, the mean to 102.6, the 90th percentile to 238 and the 99th percentile to 476; the longest observed wait is 912 rounds. And the rarity also reads in blocks: 82.24% of 20-round blocks contain no 100x at all, and neither do 37.83% of 100-round blocks. A player who sits down for 100 rounds therefore has better than a one-in-three chance of never seeing the multiplier the video showed them in ten seconds.

It is this gap — between the multiplier shown and the real wait — that the "due" promise exploits: it presents as a delay to be caught up what is simply the normal shape of a rare distribution.

Wait for the streak, then bet: what does the tactic cost?

We replayed the tactic exactly as it is sold, across the full million rounds: stay out until k consecutive rounds land below 1.50x, then stake 1 unit on the next round only, cashing out at 2.00x — one bet per trigger, the counter reset after every bet. The worked example, broken down: stake 1 unit; if the round reaches 2.00x, the gross return is 2.00 units; otherwise the stake is lost. The control stakes the same unit, at the same cashout, on every round.

Reading: the tactic loses less in total — because it bets 97% less often. Per bet, it never pays less than the control; in this stream it pays a little more (the small bet counts of the long streaks leave sampling noise visible, and it is flagged as such). Waiting for the streak is exposure reduction, not an edge: the exact kernel of truth inside the videos' pitch — "you lose less" — is true in total and false per bet, and a game's price is read per bet.

Why does the brain see a multiplier as "due"?

Because the bias is real, documented — and measured in real bettors. It is the gambler's fallacy: the expectation that a run of independent events will "balance out" in the short term. Xu and Harvey (Cognition, 2014) analysed 565,915 real bets from 776 online bettors: after losing streaks, bettors selected ever riskier odds — the mean odds reached 17.07 after six consecutive losses — as if the win had become "due"; for that very reason, they won less often. On the casino floor, Croson and Sundali (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 2005), then Sundali and Croson (Judgment and Decision Making, 2006), observe the same mechanism in real staking at roulette and craps. The "easy money" videos are therefore not selling a discovery: they monetise a bias the literature has described for twenty years — a bias that acts on the player's decisions, never on the next draw.

What do these figures not say?

Four limits bound every sentence on this page. One: these are rounds simulated from the documented continuous crash model — never rounds measured at an operator. Two: the per-step multiplier ladder of Chicken Road, which its publisher InOut Games does not release, is not modelled — the same limit as our previous studies. Three: the replay prices the game's margin only; a bonus's value, cashback and any named operator's terms do not appear in it. Four: every conditional share carries the standard error published in the downloadable file, and the small cells — the streak of 5, 5,192 occurrences — are read against that error, never as point truths. Finally, there is no followed human case here: no player, no testimonial — only a million rounds, downloadable line by line.

"After five low rounds, the next round reaches 10x in 9.96% of cases — against 9.80% in ordinary times. The streak makes nothing 'due': it only makes the wait longer, and the next bet no cheaper."

— Andrew Dagor, Chicken Road Productions

Available for an interview or a comment on this data: contact the newsroom via the Press page.

Sources and methodology

References

1. Scott, Sher & Daigle, "Cash or Crash: Return to Player Percentages and Expected Value of Crash Games", UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal, vol. 30, February 2026, DOI 10.9741/2327-8455.1509 — source of the distribution model and survival law used here.
2. Chicken Road Productions, "Crash game statistics: what 1 million simulated rounds reveal", 2026 — the published dataset (1,000,000 rounds) every figure on this page is drawn from: https://chickenroadproductions.com/en/crash-games-statistics-2026/
3. Xu, J. & Harvey, N., "Carry on winning: The gamblers' fallacy creates hot hand effects in online gambling", Cognition, vol. 131, 2014, pp. 173–180, DOI 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.01.002 — 565,915 real bets: after losing streaks, bettors select riskier odds.
4. Croson, R. & Sundali, J., "The Gambler's Fallacy and the Hot Hand: Empirical Data from Casinos", Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, vol. 30, 2005, DOI 10.1007/s11166-005-1153-2.
5. Sundali, J. & Croson, R., "Biases in casino betting: The hot hand and the gambler's fallacy", Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 1, no. 2, 2006, DOI 10.1017/S1930297500000309.
6. Documented promise tested here (logged 20 October 2026): the r/ScamCenter thread "Chicken road to get money very easy is a scam?" describing videos and apps promising easy money from Chicken Road — cited as the source of the tested promise, not as a culprit.

Complete datasets: the streak ladder (11 rows: the next round's conditional shares, standard errors and counts, at both thresholds) — Download the streak-ladder CSV — the waiting times (gaps between multipliers ≥ 10x and ≥ 100x: median, mean, percentiles, empty blocks) — Download the waiting-times CSV — and the tactic replay (both waiting rules and the control, row by row) — Download the replay CSV.
Free reuse for press and research, with attribution: "Source: Chicken Road Productions, After a Run of Busts, Is the Big Multiplier 'Due'?, 2026" — https://chickenroadproductions.com/en/is-the-big-multiplier-due/

Our other statistics

The foundation: crash game statistics — what 1 million simulated rounds reveal.

The cost of a tactic: the real cost of low cashout — what cashing out at 1.01x–1.10x actually costs.

Frequently asked questions