Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds The former professional card counter, dealer, and casino floor manager reveals his secrets and explains why the ATM is always the greatest paying machine.
1. Identify the clumsiest dealers.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds According to Zender, there are less than 100 professional blackjack card counts in the world. If you are one of them, you might get a 1.5 per cent edge. So, Zender says, reserve your energy and instead, keep a watch out for the clumsy blackjack dealer who will mistakenly flash the face-down card. Zender used to make a living off of this, maintaining a notebook of 35 poor dealers from 16 different casinos. The tactic is known as “card holing,” and it may provide you with a 6 to 9 per cent advantage over the house. (Imagine standing in front of an ATM that dispenses the twenties!) What’s the greatest part? “It’s completely legal,” Zender claims. “They may kick me out of the casino, but they will not arrest me.”
2. Keep your eyes on the prize.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds Casinos have recently sexified their table games by employing bikini-clad dealers and resident pole dancers. These are known as Party Pits, and on the surface, they seem to be typical Vegas—booze, sin, and skin. But take a deeper look. While you’re mesmerised by all those whirling legs, you’ll probably miss the fact that the casino reduced the payouts at these tables from 3/2 to 6/5. In other words, a $100 wager wins just $120 instead of the typical $150. This effectively doubles the house’s advantage.
3. Know when to say when.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds At roulette, the house always has a 5% advantage. You have a good chance of winning on the first spin. And now for the second. And now for the third. However, if you played roulette indefinitely, the house would take away all of your chips. Every casino has determined the number of hands at which they are certain to win, and that number is 30,000. (That’s why they keep luring us back with lobster and fancy rooms.) So, if you’re winning, you should quit.
4. Exploit the laws of nature.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds A roulette wheel is a mechanical device. The wheel may become imbalanced with time, or the frets separating the numbers may wear off. The longer a wheel is used, the more it wears down—and the more it may favour specific numbers. In 1873, Joseph Jagger discovered a faulty wheel in Monte Carlo and gambled on the erroneous numbers. He walked away with $400,000—roughly $7.8 million in today’s money!
5. Go big or go broke.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds “The typical slot machine is probably two or three times more expensive to players than table games,” Zender explains. Stay away from them. If you insist on turning a handle, stick to slots that cost $5 or more and gamble the maximum amount. On penny slots, the chances are stacked 15 to 20% in favour of the house. You should throw that money into a fountain. Remember to make a wish.
6. Don’t play Keno.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds Simply said, don’t. Your odds are bleak. In some casinos, the house has a 35% advantage. No one has ever matched all 20 numbers on a 20-spot lottery ticket. The chances of it occurring are one in 3,535,316,142,212,174,336. (This equates to 3.5 quintillions!)
Read more: Tips on How to Win at Online Casino Games
7. Practice makes perfect.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds The exception to the cliche that the house always wins is video poker. Typically, the house has a 0.46 per cent advantage (but other variants benefit the gambler). The paytable is directly on the machine, and the reward is substantial. What’s the catch? To payout, you must be playing at the expert level. Casinos benefit from video poker because most players are incompetent. So do your homework.
8. Stay away from the light.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds “Ninety per cent of individuals who come into a casino have no understanding of what the odds are,” Zender adds. But if you know what you’re looking for, it’s simple to recognise where the odds are stacked against you. Casinos make the games with the worst odds more appealing by adorning them with flashing lights and vivid colours. The wildest bets in craps, for example—”the Field,” “Any 7″—are the most vivid. As a general rule, keep to the drab side of the room to improve your chances.
9. Invest in a nice watch.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds There’s a reason you won’t find any clocks or windows on the first level. Casinos encourage you to lose track of time so you may play as long as you can. Because of this, several casinos forbid dealers from wearing timepieces. When you’ve got a little higher, it may be time to get off the floor and go get yourself a new watch.
10. Buy your own drinks.
Casino Tips to Help You Beat the Odds The fact is that nothing is free, even free liquor. Each casino has what is known as a “player reinvestment” fund. It forecasts how much money you’ll lose and then refunds a portion of it in the shape of comps, which are watery good drinks to the average floor visitor. The worse your odds, the more likely you are to get a free drink. Cheers!