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Gambling – From The Casinos Point of View

When you speak to gamblers, I mean people who gamble regularly whether it be roulette, poker, craps or whatever – they always seem to do rather well. I don’t know about you but I hear a lot more stories about great runs, lucky streaks and huge profits than I do about losing your shirt at 2:30 AM in a casino somewhere. But if you walk down the strip in Vegas and look up at those fantastic hotels then you have to think that they’re making a huge amount of money somehow!!!

The brutal truth is that whichever game you play in a casino then the numbers are on the side of the house. The house edge may fluctuate with what game you play or even how you play it, but it’s always in the favor of the casino. The house has a positive expectation of winning and the player alas has a negative expectation.

However it’s not all bad news for those of us who like an evening in the casino, because that the main reason why casinos very rarely lose overall is due to volume. A busy casino might have 50,000 players in a day, each one experiencing a short term outcome on his or her bets. In plain English that means that although the odds favor the casino in the long run – in the short term it’s much more likely to vary widely. The expected overall outcome (i.e. the casino winning) is more likely, the more people play.

Olaf Vancura author of the Smart Casino Gambling – calculated that a casino which has 100,000 roulette spins in a 3 month period has a 99.9% chance of making between 4% and 6.5% of the total amounts wagered in that period.

That’s quite a nice business model in a supposedly risky area of making money. The volume is the key for the casino, they are happy to see people win or get lucky – in fact a casino filled with misery is unlikely to draw in the punters. As long as they can draw in enough people to play, then the mathematics will take care of the rest. The more people play the more likely they are to make money overall. It’s called the Law of large numbers and will virtually guarantee a casino makes a profit.

Olaf also actually calculated the chance that the above casino would lose money in that 3 month period. It works out at
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – 1 !!

But that remember refers to their entire business, in the middle of this long term expectation are lots of huge player wins and amazing strokes of luck. It doesn’t matter to the casino as long as they have the volume in fact a noisy winning punter in the middle of a casino never did them any harm at all. These minor swings, the standard deviations of the expected results are what makes gambling fun and even makes some players very rich indeed.  The rules are the same for off and online roulette as long as you steer clear of the dodgy places.

So enjoy your favorite casino game with this knowledge. These are facts and the negative expectation of a player over the long term cannot be avoided by any strategy, system or betting method. As soon as there is a guaranteed system that could possibly work then one of two things will happen – all the casinos will go out of business or they will alter the rules to ensure it doesn’t work anymore.

Dealer Tracking – a Route to Roulette Wins ?

Some people would have you believe this is true, they are convinced it’s possible to spot patterns based on a dealer (rather than the roulette wheel). The theory goes like this, you track a dealer who looks like he rarely varies his speed when spinning. Advocates of dealer tracking say that it is possible to gain an edge by carefully observing these particular dealers. They believe that they can predict (obviously within a few numbers) where the ball is going to land on a particular spin.

This obviously relies on careful timing, they have to take note of where the ball is released – so they would put no bets down until the ball is spun. You are allowed to place bets whilst the ball is spinning up until the no bets call, but you have to be fairly sharp to cover the combinations in a short space of time. Remember nobody has ever claimed that they can predict the exact number in this way but merely which section or group of numbers will be hit. In fact even if you can predict within quite a large range you will significantly improve your chances and eliminate the house edge. Simply put – if you can track any number of spins from a dealer then you are going to win money as long as you bet accordingly.

So can it happen, can people really track specific dealers? Well there are plenty of people who say that they can. When you think about it anyone doing a repetitive task like this will probably to some extent fall into a kind of routine. There is a very good chance that the dealer will release the ball and spin the wheel with pretty much the same force over and over again which adds some credence to the theory.

But I remain sceptical about this one, there are just too many factors to consider, the random scatter of the ball which can be caused by anything inside the wheel, dividers, ornamentation any little ridge or bump can induce random chaos. I suspect there’s simply too much to compute, to much to analyse and too little time to do it all in. I know people who assure me it can be done, but as always with any form of gambling ‘sure thing’ it’s normally best to take these with a small ‘pinch of salt’.

The one thing that I should add is there is an obvious opportunity here for checking out something like dealer or wheel tracking by using the internet. There are now several real, online casinos who provide real time games online (that is although you play online via a video feed, you are actually playing alongside the people physically in the casino). Here you can pick a dealer to watch, sign up for the free game to watch, and analyse the spins for yourself. You won’t have to spend hours on end in a casino and you can have computers and computational aids sitting next to you in your own home as you watch.

The roulette game I play is called DublinBet and you can watch the live feed as long as you like, each dealer is identified on screen so you could track them pretty easily – make sure if you’re doing research like this that you use the free game though – it’s exactly the same games but you can easily absentmindedly flitter away quite a bit of money testing theories with real money ! You can sign up here for free – Dublin Bet Live Casino

This Post is available in German – Croupier beobachten