Fifteen years flies by so fast… where does the time go?
That’s basically correct. Standard practice is either that a % of each pot goes to the casino, or all players pay a certain amount of money per time period.
That’s one of the reasons poker can be a winning game. Although there is lots of luck involved, you only have to be skilled enough to overcome the other players and the house rake.
This is evidenced by the large number of professional poker players who consistently win money year after year. There is no such group of professional roulette or craps players.
I disagree. They definitely do want to gamble, and their profit is not (strictly speaking) guaranteed.
Of course, they want to gamble only on many rounds of games structured so that in each round they have better odds of winning than their customers. The result of this, over any reasonably long term, is essentially always a profit.
Casino owners and managers are really good at math. They’re perfectly aware that even though the odds are in their favor, people will win large amounts of money in the short term at the casino, with no cheating involved. Kicking out those winners would be remarkably stupid, because it completely eliminates any chance of ever getting that money back - they’ll just go to the casino next door to keep gambling/party it up/etc.
Casinos don’t profit by making sure everyone is always a loser in the short term. They profit by doing their best to get short term winners to stick around long enough to become a loser in the long term. Even if you walk out a winner one weekend, which lots of people do, you may be back next week and lose it all back to them.
If the casino believes that you truly won the jackpot based on luck, they aren’t going to kick you out - they’re going to comp you to a room, and if you’re a big enough whale they’ll offer to fly you home in their private jet if only you’ll stay a while longer. Because they know that eventually they’re getting all that money back. All the casino cares about is the amount of money that goes through their games. They don’t believe in luck.
Of course, if your ‘luck’ was winning the big Keno jackpot twice, they’ll be certain that you’ve figured out some bug and you’re exploiting it. Because the biggest Keno jackpots have odds so long that statistically the universe will end before anyone wins it. If you’re a big winner at roulette over many bets, they might have someone check the cameras to make sure you aren’t late-posting bets, slipping extra chips into your pile, or found a wheel with a flaw that you’re exploiting with a computer. But assuming that they know you just got lucky, you just became their best friend.
I was at a poker table once in Reno when a guy behind me at a slot machine won a huge jackpot. I think it was either $5K or $10K. You know what he did? No, he didn’t take his winnings and go home. He started feeding an entire line of slot machines as fast as he could, to capitalize on his ‘luck’. The casino could have kissed him, and I’ll bet he pissed that jackpot away within hours.
In the case of poker, though, you are playing against other customers, not the casino, so they don’t care if you win.
The casino can only lose at poker if the number of tables running doesn’t generate enough rake or session fees to pay for the associated costs of having a poker room occupying space and people working in it.
I also made a living at Blackjack, although not a very good one. I even played on a couple of different teams at different points. There’s nothing quite like sitting at a table for hours with some guy blowing smoke in your face and yelling at you when you hit your 16 against a dealer’s 7 because you ‘took the dealer’s bust card’. Ah, good times.
The easiest way to make money playing blackjack is blackjack tournaments. Most of your opponents won’t know basic strategy or when to deviate from basic strategy. And the casino won’t get mad at you, same as playing poker. I finish in the money most every tournament I play (albeit small tournaments with small buy-ins).
That is an excellent strategy. Also take the free show comps, buffet comps, player’s card discounts, and try to get your room rate lowered to the ‘casino rate’.
There’s more than one way to profit from gambling.
Just because the odds of winning don’t match the payout doesn’t make it not gambling.
If I offer you the following bet: we toss a coin, heads you give me a quarter, tails I give you a dime.
You’d be a sucker for taking that bet, but it would still be gambling.
My understanding is that most casino don’t have poker on the floor because the house takes so little money that the floor space is better used doing anything else.*
They may allow people to rent a room and a dealer if they want to play poker.
*- The World Series of Poker being a notable exception. It is a spectator sport, like boxing, that draws people to the casino who then play other games. Binion’s Horseshoe used to take out slot machines to make floor space for the World Series.
While I agree that if the casino thinks you won because you were lucky, they want you to stay and keep playing (and lose all you’ve won), I believe offering you a comped room indicates they think it was NOT luck.
Don’t get me wrong: they give out comped rooms all the time. I read a book be a reporter who covered the World Series of Poker for years before it became a TV event, and every year the casino comped his room. Because they knew his stories were good advertising.
They give big players comped rooms because it makes them feel special and it costs far less than the casino will make off that player either through losings or through him making playing at the casino look good (so advertising, basically). And they know folks are more likely to gamble at the casino attached to their hotel.
But when the casino starts suggesting things you could be doing for free that happen outside the casino (like, “We’d like to offer you a complementary suite; Dianne here can show it to you,”), that is because they want you to STOP playing, and they don’t want to make a scene by throwing you out.
Not at all. If you win big on the slots or roulette the first thing they’ll do is ask where your staying and if you’re staying elsewhere they’ll offer you a comp suite, if you’re staying in house you get upgraded. They damn well want you to keep playing with your winnings there, not in another casino, to get as much as possible back off you, of course they’ll also invite you into the previously privileged roped off high rollers areas to tempt you even more, give you free buffet or dinner tickets again so you don’t have to leave the casino and spend money elsewhere etc etc etc.
So they want to keep you in the casino and you think that’s a way of stopping you from playing? What?
They’re offering you a suite in the hopes it will keep you in the building longer so you play more. If I hit it big playing Mississippi Stud and win $25,000, they don’t want me to happily go buy a steak dinner and go home. They want me to stay there and play for higher stakes. A free room will keep me around to do that. They know I am unlikely to just sit in my room with $25,000. I’m going to sit in my room for a bit, then wander down to play.
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My understanding is that most casino don’t have poker on the floor because the house takes so little money that the floor space is better used doing anything else.*
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I cannot think of a full-blown casino outside of Vegas I have ever been to that does not have a poker room. I have wandered into casinos in thirty places around North America and every one had poker. Many Vegas casinos have been dropping poker just because they overbuilt poker rooms during the poker boom, and the poker business is coalescing into the best rooms, but there’s a zillion casinos there so that was kind of inevitable. It’s a profitable enterprise… if the tables are full of happy players, and Vegas overdid it so many rooms were empty.
Poker also has the advantage of pulling people into the casino whose primary interest is poker (here I am raising my hand) who might perhaps be inclined to blow a few bucks on blackjack while waiting for a seat, or who might drag along a spouse who doesn’t like poker but will play slot machines (here my hand is going down, my wife loves poker.)
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I also made a living at Blackjack, although not a very good one. I even played on a couple of different teams at different points. There’s nothing quite like sitting at a table for hours with some guy blowing smoke in your face and yelling at you when you hit your 16 against a dealer’s 7 because you ‘took the dealer’s bust card’.
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I long ago stopped using the phrase “but it’s random, sir.” To some people it is not, even though it is, if you see what I mean. I will object to the second deck change in an hour, though.
My favourite poker story, though, is when I met John “The Engineer” Turmel at the Brantford casino. John Turmel is famous for being the losingest election candidate known to exist anywhere in the world; he stood as an independent in 86 elections, advertising some sort of new currency system where nobody had debt, or something, and lost every one. He actually claims to be a professional gambler and an article about him said he moved to Brantford to play in its high end limit games (it spreads up to $50-$100.)
Anyway, one day I’m there playing some $10-$20 kill and the little white-haired guy next to me is taking notes on the other players. He’s very friendly, telling people what he’s doing and taking notes on them and telling them sly little things like “oh, I know what YOU’RE doing when you three bet” and generally being a charming but slightly crazy old man. I was seated to his immediate left and looked at his notebook. He was writing things very small and filling every page, like a crazy person does. I figured out who he was and introduced myself, so I figure I can call him John.
Well, I don’t know what John is a professional at gambling at, but it sure as hell is not poker. He was a king donkey, easily and visibly the worst player at the table. He was cold calling three bets with KT offsuit, not raising with premium hands in late position, playing too many hands in general, folding to a $20 river bet with $360 in the pot… like, if you were to make a list of The Ten Most Common Errors A Fish Makes In Hold 'Em, I assure you I saw John made every one of them. It was hilarious, to be honest. And although I am sure openly taking notes is against some sort of house rule, nobody bothered to stop him.
I have not seen him there in a few years so I assume he ran out of money. The competition there at any level you could make a living at is quite tough.
One important point is that in a game of chance there’s no such thing as a “hot streak” - in the sense of a record of winning that predicts anything about the future. Looking at history, of course there are runs during which a player wins at a rate well above what the odds predict. But this says nothing about his performance in any future set of trials. (“The dice have no memory.”)
Casinos know this. They also know that human nature likes to see patterns even where they don’t exist - so a “hot” player is likely to believe he’ll keep winning. A guy with a bunch of money disposed to want to gamble with it is a guy you want in your casino - it would be madness to discourage him.
The saying some poker player once made, which I think was Chris Ferguson, was “luck, by definition, is streaky.”
A casino will never, ever, ever kick a lucky player out. Never. They specifically want that person to stay. A player who just had a lucky break is literally their target market; it’s a person with lots of fresh dough who is inclined to gamble. The premise of the OP is nonsense. A casino will only kick someone out for cheating, or having figured out a system to win (which is increasingly unlikely) or for being an unruly drunk or some such thing. I’ve seen a lot of “they kicked me out 'cause I was winning” stories on here and other places online and the sense I get is that behind 97% of them was a drunken altercation that was the REAL reason for ejection.
The casinos also aren’t likely to suddenly offer you a suite, either. Hit it big on slots or at a table and what will happen is that a host will introduce themselves to you. They’ll get your personal information and maybe comp you a meal or two, maybe take something off your bill at the end of your stay. Then they will offer you all sorts of stuff to come back. That’s what a host does - offer incentives to return like free rooms, limos, Free Play, comped meals and shows, stuff like that.
You likely fall into one of three broad categories: a whale, which means they offer you that stuff anyway because your theo is outrageous, a mid-roller who can be induced to change their play/stay pattern by free stuff, or a tourist/micro-roller who is only viewed as part of an aggregate. The random “lucky player” means nothing to casinos these days, if ever.
In Uk even though the betting industry is regulated it is not legally binding. So if you place a bet on a horse for eg at a high street betting store and your horse wins, the store can refuse to pay out and you have no recourse in law. The bet is not a legal contract but a gentlemans agreement. If they refuse you cant do bugger all.
Most will pay out all the time as their reputation will suffer.
There’s a book I once read, bought for like $1 in some warehouse-sized book clearance store, called “Big Deal: A Year As A Professional Poker Player”, by Anthony Holden.
Published in 1992, it covers how he, as a reporter sent to cover the World Series of Poker, accidentally wound up in the game, and how he decided to try being a pro for a year and see if he would finish better in the Series the second year.
At one point he mentions how, if he was getting low on cash, he’d just play Blackjack for a while. He made it clear that he doesn’t enjoy playing Blackjack, at least in part because he consistently makes money at it.
But he never gives any indication of how. Not even a “just lucky, I guess.”
I found the rest of the book to be an entertaining read, but can’t shake the feeling that there’s a story there that wasn’t being told.
So, you’re wondering how in the hell someone can “accidentally” wind up in the WSoP:
Long story short: a seat at the Series costs $10,000. For about a week beforehand there will be “satellite games”, where a seat costs $1000 and the prize is a seat at the Series. As a man who loves to play poker, he would play in these games.
He never expected to win one.