Dan’s Guide To Smart Casino Gambling
Okay, you’re going to Vegas for a vacation. You’re not a professional gambler, and you don’t plan on being one. You’re willing to accept that the house has an edge over you, but you’d like to have a good time, spend as little money as possible while still getting that thrill from the risk, and maximize your chance of actually winning overall while you’re there. So, what can you do to make this all happen? Here are some guidelines:
Know your Games
There are a lot of gambling games in Las Vegas that actually have a very low house percentage. For the best of these games, the player is playing close to even-money against the house. However, there are some real sucker bets in Vegas, and if you get attracted to them you’ll get slaughtered.
There are two ways to look at how good or bad a game is - first, is the percentage of your bet that the house will eventually keep. Some games have a house ‘vig’ as low as .5% of your bet or less, and some can be as high as 30%! The second criterion is speed of the game. When the house as the edge against you, speed kills. The best chance for you to be ‘lucky’ and beat the house comes with the fewest number of plays. The more you play, the less chance you have of winning. And, your cost per hour goes up. Your best chance of beating the house is to find a game with a low percentage, and put your whole trip bankroll on one bet. Win or lose, quit. You’re very close to 50-50 to double your money that way. Trouble is, it’s not much fun to be in Vegas if you lose that first bet. So you want to draw a balance between how much you play and how likely it is to lose. The best way to do that is to find the slowest-playing games that have a low house percentage.
The Worst Games
In terms of the house percentage, the worst games you can play are:
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Keno (-17% to -34%)
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The Big Six Wheel (or money wheel)
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The proposition bets in craps (the hard ways, etc) (-5% to -26%)
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Roulette (-5.26%)
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Slot Machines (-1% to -15%)
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Caribbean Stud (-5.74%)
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Most other small side games
In terms of speed, the fastest games in the casino are:
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Slot Machines ( 200 to 400 Plays/hour)
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Video Poker (200 plays/hr)
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Craps (up to 200 rolls per hour)
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Baccarat (150 hands/hour)
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Blackjack (50-100 hands per hour)
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Roulette (50 spins per hour)
The Best Games
In terms of house percentage, the best games in the casino are:
It’s no coincidence that the best games from a percentage standpoint also tend to be the fastest. The house can afford to take a smaller percentage if they’re getting many more plays per hour.
The big exceptions here are slot machines and prop bets in craps. They are both the fastest games in the house and have the worst odds.
One more thing: of the games above, only blackjack requires a reasonably sophisticated strategy. To play it inexpensively, you MUST learn basic strategy. There are lots of books around to teach you, and the casino will probably even let you keep a little plastic reference card on the table with you if you forget. Learn the strategy, and don’t deviate from it. Forget streaks, hunches, etc. If hitting a 16 agains a 7 is correct (and it always is for a non-card counter), then always do it. Never take insurance, even if the dealer is ‘due’ for a blackjack or is ‘on a streak’ of blackjacks (neither exist, of course).
If you don’t want to go through the effort of learning the game properly, I suggest you stick with mini baccarat or pass line bets at craps. Contrary to what the other players might tell you (especially the ones frantically writing on their little pads of paper at the Baccarat table), there is NO STRATEGY to these games. It’s essentially a coin flip. Put your money down, cross your fingers. To my way of thinking, that makes them as boring as watching paint dry. But to each his own.
Calculating your Cost of Gambling
So how much money do you need to play in Vegas? To figure out how much the casino will earn from you (if luck evens out), take the size of your bet, multiply it by the house percentage, and multiply that by the number of hands per hour that you’re going to play. For example, let’s say you’re going to play $5 blackjack (.7% house edge), for four hours a day. Here’s what the casinos expect to earn from you:
4 hours X 75 hands/hr X 5 X .70% = $10.50
Ten bucks for a whole afternoon of gambling is pretty cheap. Now let’s look at the worst games. Let’s say you’re going to play dollar slots, one dollar at a time for four hours. Typically, the house take will be something like 3% on machines like this (worse on quarter slots, worse yet on nickel slots). Your cost of gambling:
4 hours X 400 spins X $1 X 3% = $48
So it costs you $48 to play the slots. (the quarter slots aren’t much better - you’re risking 1/4 the money, but the house edge is often 3 or 4 times higher than on the dollar slots). Also, the slot payout includes the longshots, which you are unlikely to hit during a 4 hour period or even a weekend (or a lifetime). The more likely odds you’ll face at the slot machine is probably something like 5-10%.
However, there’s another factor - how much could you lose if you’re really unlucky? Without getting into heavy math, you can roughly figure that in one hour you could lose as much as 50 times what you should. Over 10 hours you could lose as much as 14 or 15 times what you ‘should’ (at 2 standard deviations). So if you’re playing $5 blackjack for 10 hours over a weekend, expect it to cost you about $26.50, but you could lose as much as $425, (or equally likely, win $375). Most of the time you won’t win or lose that much playing $5 blackjack, but winning or losing 200 isn't out of the question. If you plotted the results of 1000 players who just walked out of the casino doing exactly what you did, it would form a bell curve with the median at -26.50, and with 95% of the people being somewhere between down $425 and up $375. The other 5% will be somewhere above and below those numbers. As you can see, you only have to be a little lucky to post a profit over that time.
Let’s look a the worst case: You just saw ‘Hard 8’ at the theatre, and decide to go play craps and bet the hardways just like the pro in the movie. You’re betting $5 at a time, 200 times an hour, at a house advantage of maybe 15%. This fun little game will cost you $150/hr.
So, the difference between the best games (blackjack, $10.50 for four hours) and the worst (prop bets in craps, $600 for four hours) is a factor of sixty! And that’s with the same $5 bet size on both.
Size your trip bankroll
Given this information, figure out what game you want to play, take the total money you want to risk on the trip, and divide it into equal daily amounts. Let’s say you’re willing to risk $1000 on your trip, and you’ll be there for 2 days. Limit yourself to $500 per day for gambling. Based on the info above, you know that you should be playing $5 or $10 bets, and no more. Limit yourself to blackjack, baccarat, and pass line bets in craps. Take your time. If you lose your $500, you’re done for the day. If you win early, feel free to increase your bet sizes a bit if you want (but just a bit). Better yet, pocket the winnings and go buy yourself something nice with it.
If you lose half of your daily bankroll, you might also consider stepping your bet sizes down if you’re not at the table minimums. Remember, you’re in Vegas to have a good time, and that means staying in the game. But don’t be hesitant to just quit gambling at any time and go do something else. Vegas is like freakin’ Disneyland these days.
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