I meant the slot machine RETURNS $.90 for every dollar bet, not takes.
There are some places that advertise “Loosest slots in town.”
On a simpsons episode once, there was a casino advertising, “Loosest craps in town.”
I just heard on tv (and tv wouldn’t lie to me 
) that card-counting is not technically illegal if you do it in your head, with no help from anyone else. However, any casino, being a private business, has the right to refuse anyone. So if you’re a known card-counter, they are perfectly within their rights to not let you play.
If that is incorrect information, feel free to dispel my ignorance.
Also, he’s not SenorBeef.
A couple of things about card counting:
First of all, you definitely do have an edge if you do it correctly. It’s a very slight edge, less than 0.5% IIRC, and it’s very, very difficult to do correctly.
Secondly, card counting is not “illegal.” You will not be arrested or go to trial for it. It is against casino policy and they will often remove you from their premises and even outright ban you for life for doing it there…but only of you do it well enough to win consistently.
They may also foil you by only allowing one betting limit on the table so that you can’t use counting strategy. Card counting depends on you being able to bet more or less per hand depending on the status of the shoe. A $5 - $100 table can turn into a $10 only table and your edge is gone.
Haj
The key to any card counting system in Blackjack is the ability to vary your bets. The odd are against you? $5 (or whatever the minimum is) bet. It shifts to your favor, play the maximum. If the casino sees you doing this (and it’s pretty hard to hide), they can, and will, ask you to either level your bets or leave the casino.
No, that’s exactly right. In the book “Bringing Down the House”, a team of MIT students had several people working together to count cards and place large bets when the odds were favorable. That was also legal, although the casinos work very hard to spot them and ban them.
Just for the record, I have a friend who won BIG at a casino in northern Wisconsin. $300k, IIRC. She was just there with her family, on a lark, and hit one last button on the way out the door.
What did she do with the money? They sold their house and moved to a small town where she changed careers to become - anyone? anyone? - a beekeeper!
SenorBeef, you had me laughing with your descriptions of all the idiotic strategies employed by the casino wunderkinds you’ve found yourself encountering.
This site lists some house odds for various games. Don’t know if they’re 100% accurate, but I’m sure they’re in the ballpark (probably assumes that you are playing basic correct betting strategy for games like craps and blackjack.)
So stick to craps and blackjack, and stay the fuck away from keno.
With all that financial expertise she should have been a bookkeeper.
I remember in college thinking that, faced with a game with 50/50 odds, the “double every time you lose” strategy would result in almost always coming out ahead.
I blame the fact that I’d hardly gambled at all in my life, and that I hadn’t taken a math class in five years.
I still don’t quite understand why it doesn’t work, not well enough to explain it, but I do understand that it’s a baaaad idea.
Daniel
There are a couple of reasons why this won’t work. Eventually, you will hit a losing streak long enough that you will not have the funds to make that double bet anymore. Then there are table limits like we talked about with blackjack card counting. This might prevent you from doubling even if you do have the funds.
Haj
Heh–I just ran across a thread in General Questions that reminded me why I finally concluded it wouldn’t work.
I still feel pretty smart for coming up, all on my lonesome, with a gambling fallacy so prestigious it’s got its own name and everything.
Daniel
It does work, but only if you have (essentially) infinite money and there’s no maximum bet.
Otherwise, when you do eventually hit e.g. red ten times in a row (odds: 1 in 1024), you have to be able to bet 1024 times your initial bet for a 50/50 chance of getting your money back. If you can’t, either because you’re out of money or because there’s an upper betting limit, you’re out of luck.
I think it doesn’t. Because there’s no such thing as infinite money, and as long as the money is actually finite (no matter how large the quantity), the odds are still stacked against me. Check my coin analogy in the linked thread.
Daniel
Anyone with less than truly infinite money will eventually lose if they place a large enough number of bets. In practice, the maximum loss for a given number of bets tends to be a function of the number of bets, so you could take a million dollars with you to the casino and be confident of winning e.g. $100 without having to get your butler wire you more. This is why I wrote “(essentially) infinite” – the probability distribution for a fixed number of bets make the likely maximum loss fairly predictable. To absolutely guarantee you won’t lose, you do have to have a truly infinite amount of money. Of course if you did, you would also be guaranteed of eventually making an infinite amount of money. (Of course there’s no such thing as infinite money in reality, so what? There’s also no casinos without a maximum bet, or people with enormous sums of money who desperately want to win $100 at roulette. We’re talking math here!) 
Which is what I was saying.
No, actually. You’d end up with exactly the same amount of money you started with: infinite ;).
Daniel
Best way to convince yourself the Martingale system dosen’t work:
Get a basic casino program for your pc.
Give yourself a bankroll of $1000.
Play roulette and always bet on black.
Start with the initial bet of $1.
Double your bet each time you lose.
If you win, start again with the $1 bet.
See what happens first, you making $50 or the game taking your $1000.
“Illegal” / “Liable to get your legs broken”–what’s the difference in the end? 
The reason why I stopped playing Blackjack. I hate the whole you ruined the hand by hitting logic.
Some other dumb things I have seen:
Folding with three of a kind showing (7 card stud) because it was 6-6-6. He said he can’t win with the satan’s number. Apparently drinking and gambling are fine.
A lady on roulette who put a dollar on every street. That’s 12 dollars on a bet that pays 11:1 and nothing on 0 or 00. Somehow I don’t think you can win that way.
The young Chinese guy (maybe 25) in a trench coat who paced back and forth behind the roulette players until the time was right. Then he pounced over their shoulders to place a $500 bet on black. Yep it was red. I guess his timing was off.
I don’t think that there is any game in a casino with a true “50/50” bet anyway. Roulette has Green/0 and possibly Green/00 to keep the odds from reaching 50/50. Casinos are run by crafty people. Generally much smarter than gamblers. The best way to win in gambling is to be the house.
Best time I’ve ever had playing blackjack was when a friend had his bachelor party in Vegas so we had our own table, just the guys, free drinks and a dealer. We could BS about whatever we wanted, and the best part was our dealer was even more of a smartass than any of us and kept cutting down my friend T, who is a ditzy pretty boy (although actually very smart), but everytime something dumb would come out of his mouth she’d cut him to the quick. Had us all in stitches (him included).