Various blogs allegedly teach you how to make big bucks at gambling. I will teach you how not to lose any.
While expatiating upon winning strategies, many self-proclaimed pro-gamblers may give you the illusion that there are easy and mathematical ways to beat casinos at their own games. Some of them even try to sell you such methods ! However, you often hear of a desperate soul throwing himself out of a window because of heavy losses, but you rarely meet people who do make money out of the system. The fact is, most players claiming they have a winning method do sincerely believe so, but their logic is flawed. In order to stimulate your critical mind, I submit to you the following (essentially) erroneous method. You can give it a try with your own money if you wish, although I strongly warn you against this idea !
The pseudo-method has to do with playing in a negative expectation game (but not in a positive expectation game). In other words, you will play faster, but you will also lose money. The reason for playing faster is the following:
When you pay the casino, you give them a 2 % profit on your money. (More exactly a 25 % profit for the casino. Because of the way the math works, you actually give the casino a 25 % edge on your money and not a 2 % edge. However, you also pay the casino a 5 % commission on your winnings instead of a 2 % profit, so they basically get their rake back from your losses.) In the short run, this leads to very big wins. But in the long run, given the number of runs and the size of the bets, you cannot but lose money, so you run away from the casino with your tail between your legs.
Our argument applies to any bet that involves a negative expectation. Those bets are either really bad bets or they are bets which only slightly improve your chances of winning, not the odds against the house. Because of the negative expectation, the even money payouts will get smaller as the game progresses. When you pay the casino a $10, your payout on even money bets (unts, reds, odds, evens, 2 to 1) will be $10 plus $1, which is $21, and if you lose, you lose $10 instead of $11, which is $1031, and your $10 loss is a curse upon your bankroll because it represents a negative expectation of $31.
The implied odds curse works in the same way as the commonly known EV theorem of wagering. When you play a game of roulette, and you place a $1 bet on black, there is a favorable mathematical expectation to the player whereby the probability of winning when it comes to the even money bet is 5 : 1, or even money bet gets its name because it pays out at even money. Suppose you have made a series of all even money bets, you will win at the end of the series, and you will also get some money, but it will be nothing compared to what you would have won if you had kept the same $1 bet on black. This is clearly not what you want. It is a good idea to mix up bets within a set strategy, and have some higher payoffs than lows, alternatively.
It is a lot easier to realize the Dewavegas advantage when it comes to roulette , as it is pretty easy to get a decent house edge for the game. Half of the house edge comes from the ‘0’ slots, and everywhere else. The American layout is slightly better, as it offers a house edge of 2.63 ( versus the European house edge of 2.15), but still it’s hard to beat. The game is designed for a house edge of 5.26% or 2.70% on ‘0’ slots, and just below that with ’00’ slots. The ‘0’ slots, ’00’ slots, and 0 and ‘1’ slots have a house edge of 2.63%, so they are definitely ‘bad’ bets. splits, highs, Aces, Ravens, and Queens are all ‘bad’ bets and the house edge increases with the less frequent occurrence of splits, highs, Aces, Ravens, and Queens. You won’t win at this game if you play these bets very frequently, but if you should should happen to find yourself in a situation where you have more than one treate in a session when you can play the same bet, it is still a pretty good bet. This is because the probabilities of winning and losing are about the same, so you have a 50% chance of winning if a coin flips and a 50% chance of losing if a coin doesn’t.
So how do we go about finding a good house edge?