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Can You Beat the Casino House Advantage?

You can never be a good casino player unless you accept the reality that a casino is a business. And as a business, it has to make a profit---out of your losses. Over the long haul, the casino will beat you no matter how good a player you are. Knowing how a casino can beat you will help you avoid the pitfalls of casino games; and, by accepting the reality that casinos will beat you in the long run, you can take your losses in stride and any unexpected winnings happily inside your bank account.

With the exception of blackjack, whose odds vary as cards are dealt out, other casino games have a fixed built-in advantage in favor of the casino. To explain this, take for example the roulette wheel which has 38 numbers, which range from 1 up to 36 plus 0 and 00. If you wagered, say $1 on any of these 38 numbers and you win, you receive $35 plus your $1 original bet, or a payoff of 35-1 instead of the true odds of 37-1. By adding the 0 and 00 in the roulette wheel, the casino builds a 5.26 percent house advantage in this game.

Does that mean that the casino is unbeatable? Of course not, otherwise no customer will ever dare enter through the doors of a casino and the casino might just as well close down its business. Because of the randomness of the numbers that turns up on the wheel, the element of luck always produces a winner. And if that winner turns away, goes home and never returns, he is said to have beaten the house advantage. But if he continues to play, like what you would expect normal human beings to do, the casino will eventually, over the long run, take back all of his winnings.

To increase your chances of winning and to bring down your losses to a minimum, see to it that you understand quite well the game that you choose. Many losses are not due to "bad luck" but are caused more by lack of skill or sufficient knowledge of a blackjack player, for instance, on whether he should "hit" or "stand" or which cards he should split up. To increase your chances of winning in the short term, master the games that give you the best odds to win and ditch those that depend only on luck to win. Prepare yourself to the strong possibility of losing and the pleasure of an unexpected win. If you understand pretty well that the casino will grind down your bankroll over the long run, the better you are prepared to walk away while you are ahead.