Mariana Duarte
Mariana Duarte handles the numbers on Play Dork Unit. She checks every RTP, volatility, and max win figure we publish against Hacksaw Gaming's official documentation, logs long demo sessions to sanity-check hit rates, and maintains the paytable and bonus buy data across the site. If a number appears in one of our tables, she has traced it to the game sheet rather than copied it from another review site.
What Mariana covers on Play Dork Unit
Mariana's rule is simple: no number publishes here until she has traced it to Hacksaw Gaming's official game sheet. That covers the 96.24% default RTP and the three bonus buy figures (96.41% FeatureSpins, 96.38% Gift Bonanza, 96.35% Dork Spins), the medium 3-of-5 volatility rating, the 10,000x max win cap, the 16 fixed paylines, and every symbol value in the paytable, down to the strawberry's 1.00x for five of a kind. When a figure on another site disagrees with the sheet, the sheet wins, and she notes the discrepancy rather than averaging it away. She then sanity-checks the documented behavior in long demo sessions, logging hit rates and feature frequencies to confirm the client matches the paper.
Her bylined pages are the numeric core of the site: the Dork Unit RTP and volatility breakdown, the 10,000x max win analysis, and the blog's math-heavy guides, including the bonus buy cost and RTP comparison and the honest strategy guide that opens with expected loss instead of hiding it. She also maintains the fact tables that appear across the full slot review and the homepage.
Mariana's second job is defensive: when Elliot tests a casino, she cross-checks the RTP build stated inside that operator's game client against the 96.24% default, so a reduced-RTP build can never hide behind our review. Her risk-framing baseline never moves: every RTP she publishes is below 100%, and she will tell you exactly what that means for your bankroll.
Meet the rest of the Play Dork Unit editorial team.