The Ultimate Guide to Advantage Gambling

Want to get a leg up in your next casino game? Advantage gaming is when you play casino games legally that give you an edge either the house, other players, or both. While it’s not exactly cheating, some casinos don’t allow this type of play. For instance, card counting in Blackjack is a well-known technique that can give a player an edge over time – but can see them easily banned from casinos for doing so.

Advantage gambling is based on mathematical approaches to games and betting.

Types of advantage gambling

Counting cards in Blackjack

Counting cards in Blackjack is easily the most well-known advantage gambling technique, although most people who have heard of it don’t actually know how to do it. 

In Blackjack, you have a certain number of decks of cards in a game. Depending on your current hand, and what the dealer pulls, you count up or down, depending on the value of each card. The advantage that you gain comes from the way in which you increase bets depending on the number you’ve counted in your head.

Using this technique, you can gain an advantage over the casino. This technique is so well known that casinos have increased the number of decks in a game (for higher stakes games) so that it becomes nearly impossible to use this technique.

Skilled play in poker

How good are you at poker? If you’re twice as good as the people playing at your table, then you’re going to reap serious rewards over time. Poker is a game of luck, sure – but it’s also a game of skill. If you are playing with newbies who are just starting out then your chances of winning against them are going to be higher.

It’s not exactly a great technique to use against your friends at a weekly poker game, that’d be a bit rude! However, if you go to the casino and play on tables at a certain time of day when you’re more likely to encounter players that are much worse than you, then you can gain an advantage. If you hit casino tables in holiday destinations where very casual players are giving it a crack, then it can be even more lucrative.

Matched betting

Matched betting is a sports betting technique where bets are placed at two different bookmakers and at least one of the bets placed takes advantage of a free bet. This technique is risk free as unless the bookmakers are run by the same company, there is no knowledge of the two bets being placed at once.

The technique involves placing a back bet (backing a winner) with your free bet at one bookmaker, and then making the opposing bet at another bookmaker. This way, you are covered regardless of the outcome. To find the best possible matched betting approaches, you need to look into the odds across a number of different bookmakers to compare which will have the most beneficial outcome. 

Playing at more amateur casinos

The way to beat some popular casino games is by doing bonus codes hunting. For new online casinos, their bonus codes may be quite significant or they may not have set up their terms and conditions correctly, allowing you to play games with a better edge, over say, slots. 

In real life casinos, there are some other ways to take advantage of amateur setups.

Various advantage play techniques fare better at more amateur casinos such as: 

• Shuffle tracking, which means memorizing the run of cards anticipating that a run will be included in the next deal when deck shuffling is done by hand
• Noticing that a roulette table is accidentally weighted off, by seeing certain numbers appear more regularly than the other side of the wheel
• When dealers accidentally show a tiny portion of a card when dealing
• Finding winning odds in a strange game, such as cards-based craps

Those people with a keen eye and a propensity for mathematics and statistics are able to take advantage of the types of scenarios to gain the upper hand in a game. The scenarios are, however, unique to particular casinos, dealers, and a particular table on the floor. You’ll need to spend a lot of time watching play for these to become apparent.

Advantage gambling isn’t easy – or everyone would do it

Advantage gambling is tricky to master and when you do you run the risk of getting kicked out of a game or a casino. In reality, it’s better to master a game where the house edge is low, for your best chance at winning big.