So here’s a way to beat the house, even when the odds are against you. Or so I’ve been told, and want to know what’s wrong with it.
Each time you lose, the next bet is double the last. When you win, you start again at the level you started. You win faster at games that are close to even, but as long as you can cover your losses, you will always win (as long as you win sometimes, and stop at one of those times).
Say you start with $10 on roulette, say even numbers. If you win, bet $10 again. If you lose, bet $20. If you win, start at $10, if you lose bet $40. And so on.
So what’s wrong with this?
That is what is known as a ‘Martingale’ progression, and it’s the oldest sucker play in the book.
What’s wrong with it is that when your progression wins, you only win exactly one unit. But once in a while you’ll run into a string of losses big enough to hit the table limit, and you’ll be wiped out. Even if there was no table limit, you’d soon reach a number of consecutive losses big enough that your next bet would have to be more than the entire GDP of the United States.
I once had 20 consecutive losses in Blackjack. If I were progression betting, starting at $5, my next bet would have to have been 52 million dollars.
In practical terms, let’s say you’ve got $1000 to play with. You bet $5, with your martingale progression ready to go if you lose. It’s only going to take 8 consecutive losses for you to lose your entire bankroll.
There are no betting styles or patterns that can ever turn a sequence of losing bets into a winning bet. In the end, betting red or black in roulette you are going to lose 5.26% of all the money you put on the table. Period. Nothing in the universe will change that if you play long enough.
In the very short term, a progression system changes the pattern of your wins and losses. You’ll have an awful lot of small wins, punctuated by a few horrible losses. It’ll cost you more to play this way than if you just bet the minimum on every hand, for the simple reason that you’re putting more money into action. If you start at $5, you’ll be putting out a lot of $10, $20, and $40 bets. At the end of your progression, if you finally hit your color you’ll be up exactly $5 from where you started. Whoopee.
Still, let’s say you had to to get home, and a plane fare is $500. You only have $450. If you HAVE to catch that plane, your best chance of winning the money you need is to go to the baccarat table and put your $50 on bank, and use a progression if you lose. If you win your progression you have plane fare. With $50 starting, you’ll only go broke about one time in eight. The other seven times you’ll have your plane fare.
I may be responding to an old post but I just want to share that coming into this forum had helped me a lot about gambling.
Welcome to the SDMB.
We would appreciate it, however, that if you are not contributing facts or arguments to a debate thread, you refrain from posting to it and reviving an ancient zombie.
Thanks 
I was up almost 100% last night playing slots. But then I lost most of it and wound up breaking even
So, you made $19 playing $10 worth of slots, one time, then fed $9 back into the machines?
What are the odds in a SDMB thread that post #24 quotes post #26?
50:50–it either does or does not 
Last time I was in Vegas, I found a few machines where I always broke even. They weren’t very fancy and were off by the side like the casino didn’t want them noticed. But every time I played them, I won the exact same amount I put in.
So did you pay for parking? A room? Transportation? Dinner? Smokes? Drinks? Companionship? If yes to any of those, you didn’t break even.
Y2K bug? (Let’s hope it wasn’t some sort of wormhole.)
That can be true for any vacation. In my case, I practiced on the same type of machine at my local arcade before I went. 
I started a thread one time called: “What are the most feared words in Vegas”
Sure it got dumped on a lot, but I still say the most feared words are … “Let it ride”
You can win in Las Vegas, but you have to have a winners attitude … go in a winner, go in smart, know where the money is in your pocket at all times, don’t take the free drink, think winner, winner, winner, take a good looking girl with you on your arm that has never played the crap table before that wears a low cut dress with a push up bra, tip the casino employees by putting a bet on the line for them, tip the waitress for just water or coffee, but if you stay to long the odds will get you.
Craps is my favorite game … the spirit at a hot table can’t be beat. I’ve seen a couple of business men come away with $25,000 at a hot table. They were just in town on a convention and they chided each other into winning … betting on the pass line and covering all the numbers for a long roll.
I like to play the slots near the crap tables or overlooking the casino floor like they do at the MGM. Just idle your time nothing in a hurry waiting for the signs of a hot table or a couple of newlyweds all naive and everything.
Some people play with the house against the shooter, but not me I play craps to win. Cover the hardways (4,6,8,10) with ten dollars each and then buy or place the same numbers (4,6,8,10) so when the normal (4,6,8,10) comes up they will pay you on the place bet, but take your hardway money away.
Take the place bet money and apply back on the hardway till you win a hardway number (4,6,8,10) if the 6 or 8 hits the hardway then you now have $100 dollars, but if the 4 or 10 hits you will only have $80 and they will give it to on the table as a payoff leaving your original bet out there, but don’t take it. Say let it ride … for a high roller these are the most feared words in Vegas to the Casino. They like to win … it’s like hunting, like hunting with a gun that is, it’s the hunt that is exciting to law enforcement, but that’s another story about adrenalin rush.
So lets say it is a double 6 or 8 that hits the second time with $100 on the table now that becomes $1,000 … you can see where I am going with this right? What if you let that ride? Well they won’t let you unless it is a high stakes table and high stakes tables have a $200 minuim bet. If you ask to let $1,000 ride they might let you, but now the odds of hitting three in a row are really bad for you that’s where luck comes in and knowing how to throw the dice helps wit the two three’s looking at you in a vee pattern with the two fours on the bottom, but you don’t have long to arrange the dice the way you want to and they will keep changing the dice, but it does work.
So if you just want to make a couple of thousand and have a good time and pay for the trip play the crap table, play the hardways, let them ride till they won’t let you anymore, don’t play the sucker bets of the big six or the big eight, don’t play the field except on the come out roll, don’t play the 5 or the 9, just the (4,6,8,10) or start with $25 chips on the hardways. Now your talking $250 to let it ride to win $2,500 the second time.
Have a good time and remember it’s not your money till you walk out the door and remember to fill up on gas as soon as you get to Vegas if you drive lol
I don’t think the laws or probability care how big your girlfriends boobs are.
Sam, if you return to this thread after 13 years, could you explain about beating video poker? I’d have guessed the odds were set on best play, not idiot play.
My brother, who does all the hotel stuff mentioned, says that the only real way to make money is poker, since your opponent isn’t the house but other players. (The house takes a cut, of course.) He likes to hang around tournaments, not to play in them but to play people not good enough to play in them. And he has no illusions about sometimes winning and sometimes losing.
So, the way to win in a casino is to play poker against bad poker players.
Not every video poker game can be beaten - the vast majority cannot. But there do exist (or did, I haven’t looked at this stuff in a decade) some video poker games with rules that allow for a slightly positive expectation with perfect play.
For example, a ‘full pay’ deuces wild video poker game has a theoretical payout with perfect strategy of 1.007620. That’s a very low positive expectation, but it is positive.
The kicker is that most of these games are low limit, and their numbers are limited. I suspect they are used as loss leaders for the house - the most you can probably make from them is a few bucks per hour. It’s probably worth more than that for the casino to be able to advertise that they have the best odds in town on their video poker.
There are a few people around who spend most of their time playing these games and making a living off it, but it’s strictly a below-minimum-wage type existence. Maybe if you’re retired and bored and need a slight boost to your fixed income it’d be worth a shot, but most people would make far more doing just about anything else.
Here’s a breakdown of the strategy from The Wizard of Odds
And please, no one listen to anything Mr. Quatro has to say about gambling. The advice given above will cost you a lot of money. Or it’s possible that his message is a joke and I’m being whooshed. But if I’m being whooshed, maybe other people are as well.
One thing he said is true - gambling is better if you have a hot babe beside you in a low cut dress. It won’t earn you an extra nickel, but you won’t mind losing your money quite so much. I also agree that people following his strategy should tip the dealers and waitresses generously. If you’re going to lose all your money anyway, you might as well give it to the workers.
With all these people with their systems for winning craps, I’m amazed the casino I work for is bothering putting in another craps table.
ETA: You can win playing poker as long as the rake isn’t too high relative to the stakes, but most people are not winning players.
I have a true story about an easily beaten casino game. I thought I’d already posted it at SDMB, but don’t see it with Google so will post it again.
There’s a Wheel of Fortune in some Nevada casinos, a bit like roulette but with several differences: the wheel is vertical, the payoffs are fixed per slot (e.g. bet on the $20 spot to win 20:1 if the slot with a $20 bill comes up), betting is not allowed once the wheel has been spun.
In the early 1980’s I visited the (only?) casino in Kathmandu. I was seated playing Blackjack when a woman I’d known a year or two earlier approached me. (Small world!) We wandered around chatting; it was she who explained how easy it might be to beat the Wheel of Fortune in that casino.
Unlike Nevada, they allowed bets while the wheel was spinning. You can “clock” the wheel, when it’s slowed to the point where it has only about a revolution left, bet on the $20 if and only if the $20-slot is about 360° from goal. This improves your odds hugely.
But, you point out, isn’t it hard to “clock” the wheel without a lot of patience or computer assistance? Probably, but you don’t need to! The croupiers do this monotonously day after day, and they’ve got the wheel clocked if only subconsciously.
The croupier we watched always rang the bell (“No more bets”) when the wheel was about 360° from stopping. (She’d got the correlation with clicking of the wheel memorized, perhaps subconsciously.) The winning strategy was trivial. Hold bet in hand and watch croupier’s hand. When she starts reaching for the bell, glance at the $20 location, and race to bet (easily outracing croupier’s bell) when appropriate. The young lady and I stood at the table for a few minutes and indeed made 1 or 2 winning bets with this strategy.
I doubted the method would work permanently. The casino was probably well aware of the possibility and would have changed their procedures eventually in response to us.
(While in Nepal, I suppose I should tell a story on my colossal lack of savoir faire. The casino was in the biggest hotel in Nepal; it was owned by the 2nd richest man in Nepal; I was visiting Nepal to negotiate a business deal with his director. When I met the director he asked what room I was staying in – perhaps to make it gratis. A noticeable cloud passed over his face when I told him I was in a Freak Street guesthouse. :smack: The deal never developed. )
OTOH, he had a fun night out on the town.
The few times I’ve gambled, I came in knowing that I would eventually lose everything I bet, but that it would take a while and that I would have a good time getting there. And I was right every time.
This is a rather important point.
At Canadian casinos poker rakes are incredibly high; in some, $1/$2 NL and 2/5 Limit charge 10% up to $6, a staggering rake. (Ontario casino workers are better paid than most places.) At that rake nobody can win; even a very, very skilled poker player cannot beat a rake that high in the long run. The effect of the rake (or ession fee) declines as limits increase, but at 1/2NL you are doing damned well if you break even over the course of a year. I’ve had sessions where I sat in with $200, walked away with $207, and realized later I’d paid $60 in rake.
A decent poker player with good tilt control, discipline, and access to a nearby casino with a reasonable rake structure will absolutely *crush *live low- and mid-stakes games over the long run. I’m basically printing money at my local low-limit games (1/3 and 2/5) and even better, casino winnings in the UK are tax-exempt.
There are any number of players in my local pool that I would consider ‘good’ - but the majority of them suffer from at least one of three fatal flaws: 1) constant need to move up stakes, either after a big loss or when they get a big bankroll, 2) poor tilt control, and/or 3) playing PLO games where the small edge they have in fundamental play is offset by the higher variance.
Otherwise, beating any true ‘casino’ game is ridiculous. You could probably beat blackjack, but people I know that play it successfully have told me it’s mind-numbingly boring if you’re trying to grind out a profit.
Poker at least is played with other people; table talk & banter can be fun while you’re taking drunk Mr. Business Man Tourist to the woodshed and depriving him of us weekend play budget. Bonus points go to players that know how to send other players into feces-flinging monkey tilt mode, resulting in incredible spews of money for the rest of the table. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.
This thread was started in 2000 and since then ISTM that poker has gotten much more popular, with televised tournaments and more casinos being built. How much has that changed the answer to the the OP as far as poker, in the last 13 years? Are there more weekend warriors to collect money from, or more pros and semi pros to compete with?