Yeah, slot machines are generally the worst gamble in the house, combining high speed playing with terrible odds. A 90% payout is terrible.
To give people an example of just how bad slots are, consider the expected value of an hour of play at your dollar slot, vs an hour of play at a $5 blackjack table:
Assuming 200 pulls per hour, playing the slot machine with a 90% payout will cost you about $20/hr.
$5 blackjack at house odds of .5% and 80 hands per hour will cost you about $2 per hour on average.
So playing the dollar slots with your pay table will cost you ten times more per hour than playing $5 blackjack with basic strategy. And because you are playing fewer trials with a lower house advantage, you have a far better chance of actually coming out ahead in Blackjack.
About the only thing worse in the casino would be a few proposition bets in craps.
That depends on what you mean by “win”. If you want to double your initial bankroll, you’re (probably; I haven’t done the proof) correct. But if your goal is just to go home with more money than you came with, no matter how small the amount by which you won, then you can make that very likely indeed with a Martingale strategy.
Of course, there’s no free lunch: With a Martingale, you’re very likely to win, but you’re guaranteed not to win big, and while losing is unlikely, when you do lose, you’re guaranteed to lose big. But a Martingale will still (probably) let you go back home and say “I won more money than I lost”.
But on occasion, you get to go back home and say “I lost the house and the kid’s college funds. Oh, and about that retirement fund.”
If I did the math right, the odds of losing 20 times in a row are around 1 in 260,000. If you do that with Martingale at a $5, you’re now down over 2.5 million dollars. Of course the reality is that table limits prevent you from ever getting there, but they also prevent the strategy from working on a losing streak as you won’t be able to place the necessary bet to continue the strategy.
Plus, all you do is stand there and press a button. I’ll never understand the appeal of that. It reminds me of the rats who learn to press a button for a hit of heroin and soon do nothing but.
Isn’t keno the very worst? It’s been a number of years since I have studied this but I recall that getting all of the numbers right is so unlikely that it might never happen to anyone ever.
Keno has the worst odds, but the slowest play. Keno can have an edge for the house as high as 40%. But how many games of Keno can you play in an hour? Assuming you are gambling for entertainment, the hourly cost is just as important as the house edge.
It’s true that some keno jackpots have odds of winning so low that it’s likely it will never be won - in fact, you could play the game ten times per hour for the lifespan of the universe and not win. There was a guy who cheated at Keno and won a jackpot - and was immediately put under suspicion because the jackpot had never been won before in history.
i did read a book from a pro gambler who played in legal and sometimes not places that says the problem with systems was that you don’t have the unlimited bankroll you need to ride our losses until it hits
As a general rule, the games with the best odds are ones that have some strategy required to achieve them. That way, the casino still makes money off the suckers and the ignorant. For example, from memory I think people who stand on a 16 against a dealer’s 7 lose around 11% of their bet to the House on the hand in the long run. Craps players who stray off the pass/don’t pass bets with odds can give the advantages as high as 17%, as I recall. The tie bet in baccarat is a 9.5% disadvantage.
Games that require no decision making, such as roulette, the big six wheel and slot machines will generally have the worst odds.
That and the fact that the payout is crap for the risk. Martingale is like playing a $1 lottery game in which you win $2 almost every single time you play, but you can only play a dozen or so times per hour, so it’s not even great money. But, every once in a while, that $1 ticket will cost you your wife, family, house, job, car, dog, all the money you’ve ever saved, and everything else you hold dear, but you have to buy it anyway. In which case you might win $2 back with which to start your life over.
Well, yes, but that doesn’t explain their appeal. Where’s the fun in just pushing a button? Even the big wheel or roulette let you “guess” at what’s going to happen, but slot machines don’t even give you that much agency.
My pleasure centers must be wired wrong. The one time I played slots I got up in disgust after about two minutes.
Games like blackjack and roulette are more like investing in a volatile stock market. You probably won’t win much or lose much over a short period of time. Slots are like investing in a week old startup. Probably going to tank, but could be the next unicorn. And hour of $10 a hand blackjack and I might be up $50 to $100 if lucky or down the same if not. A hour of dollar slots and I might have lost $300 or I might have won $10,000 (or even millions, if progressive), if I got really really really lucky.
Not trying to justify it, but I think it’s the high risk, high reward mentality. It’s why you put money in the market, while your neighbor puts money in lottery tickets.
I think the appeal at first is the chance to win a big jackpot as @Great_Antibob said above. But after a while it becomes pure operant conditioning through intermittant reinforcement.
Watch a real slot machine addict when they win a medium-sized jackpot. I was playing poker in Vegas with some slots nearby, and a guy hit a $5,000 jackpot on the dollar slots. The only thing he did was start playing the whole row of machines at once, ensuring that he gave that $5k back in record time. There was no joy in it at all. Just an increase in his feverish pace.
Our local pub has video lottery terminals. The people at them look like robots, just mechanically pushing the button again and again. Their expressions never change.
A friend of ours was addicted to them and blew her entire divorce settlement of about a hundred thousand dollars in about six months. When she hit a ‘jackpot’ it would annoy her because the machine would take a while to pay out, so she would move to another machine and keep playing because she couldn’t wait the 30 seconds for the machine to give her the receipt.
VLT and slot players eventually become pigeons poking a button for a random treat if they play long enough. They can’t stop until forced to by reality.
It is probably true that the average slot player just plays them because they’re easy with no strategy or knowledge of table game etiquette. I will play video poker if I can find full pay, but I’ve even see people try to ‘bluff’ the machine!
The juice in sports betting is usually nine or ten percent. While one’s ability to make sports bets is generally limited in number, sports betters tend to bet a lot per bet - in fact, if you look at it as a percentage of the better’s income/available cash/budget, it might be the highest bets in a casino. A guy who would be terrified to sit at a $25 per hand blackjack table for a stack of $500 will cheerfully bet $500 on the Dolphins to cover the spread.
A casino is full of suckers but none are suckier than sports gamblers. All of them think they know enough about sports to make money at it. In fact, virtually none do; the number of sports betters at a casino who know enough to actually have enough of an edge beat a casino vig is ludicrously tiny - it probably isn’t a thousand people in all of North America.
Your odds on those Draft Kings sites and whatnot are better because, like poker, you’re playing more against other players than the house. But beat the big gaming corporations? Forget it. A genius like Bob Voulgaris can stay ahead of the house with tremendous ongoing effort and a staff. For awhile.
I think that it’s a bit more than that but it’s still a very tiny percentage. They don’t win by making a high win percentage on lots of bets. They might only make two or three bets a week where they perceive that they have an edge. This is often when the odds are off because lots of people are betting on sentiment.
There was an article in MIT Tech Review in the past year or two about a strategy to win at sports betting. They had to wait for very specific circumstances, but were very successful at it. Basically, assume that the initially posted odds are the true odds (or a noisy approximation of it). As bets come in, the bookies will adjust odds to keep an equal amount of money on each side of the bet. If the implied odds ever reach a level such that they justify a bet, then do so.
Keno, actually. It’s gambling for people who don’t like gambling. You sit and yak, probably drink, and every five minutes you look up at the board, say, “Drat. 2 out of 6,” and wait for the next game. The hold is generally 25%.* No slot or poker machine around holds that much.
*i.e. what the house holds, 75% return. Casinos look at the money flow into their coffers, not what get returned to the player.
