Top 5 Money Making Casino Strategies Debunked

There’s one golden rule when it comes to casino gaming. The house always wins. That’s not to say there’s anything fraudulent about casinos, or that you can never get lucky. It’s more a matter of basic economics. A casino is a business, and just like a shop or a building contractor or a factory, it needs to turn a profit at the end of the financial year, or it will very soon cease to exist.  

That means that the slots, and gaming tables need to take more money from casino goers than they give back. This is a familiar concept, and leads us to terms like RTP and house edge, which essentially describe that delta, either from the perspective of the amount the casino “keeps”, for example a house edge of five percent, or the amount it gives back, which would be an RTP of 95 percent.  

Where mathematics and commerce collide 

It’s all highly logical from both a commercial and a mathematical perspective. It also allows for our aspirations as gamblers to sometimes get lucky and cheat the odds with a big win. After all, on any day, some people will come out with a profit and some will make a loss. Overall, though, the casino will average out as the winner.  

What all this really means, though, is that any so-called “guaranteed way” to make money at a casino is blown out of the water. As well as being mathematically impossible, if such a thing really existed, it would have become common knowledge in the information age, and every casino from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, plus all the ones online, would be bankrupt.  

Nevertheless, there are strategies out there that sound compelling, and while some of them can certainly improve your chances, none are guaranteed to make you money. Let’s take a look at the top five. 

1.Free spins and welcome bonuses 

Most online casinos will offer generous promotions such as free spins or no deposit bonuses with no strings attached. Now surely, if you are not wagering any money in the first place, it is impossible to lose. That is absolutely correct, but not losing is not the same thing as winning.  

With 100 free spins, you are practically guaranteed that at least some of them will be winners and will put money back in your casino account. What you need to be aware of is the wagering requirement. This is invariably a condition of these sorts of offers and it states that any winnings must be re-wagered a set number of times before you can cash anything out.  

That’s not to say promotions like these are a bad thing. They can provide you with risk-free gambling and there is certainly the possibility that you will come out on top. But it is also highly possible that you will gamble it all away before you hit the cash-out wagering requirement.  

2. The Martingale 

Here’s a system that seems to have mathematics on its side. The Martingale system is often cited as a foolproof way to win 50/50 games, for example betting on black at the roulette wheel. Here’s how it goes: Set your base wager amount, for example $10, and put it on black. If you win, pocket the $10 you win and place the $10 stake on black again. If you lose, double your stake and go again. Eventually, black will come up, and when it does, you will be $10 better off, and you then start again at the $10 wager.  

It sounds compelling, as it works however many losses you sustain. For example, if red comes up five times and black on the sixth spin, you wager $10+$20+$40+$80+$160+$320. That adds up to $630. With that black finally coming up, you win $320 and your $320 stake is returned – there’s your $10 profit.  

The mathematics work for any sequence, you always end up winning that initial amount. So what’s the catch? The problem is, every table has a maximum bet limit. If in our example, the limit was $250, we would have sustained a heavy loss. If it was $500 and red had come up a sixth time, we would have been in even bigger trouble. The Martingale is characterised by frequent small wins and occasional catastrophic losses. In the long run, you will end up losing out by the house edge.  

3. The Gambler’s Fallacy 

This theory was expounded by French mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. It states that in a 50/50 wager, if one result outweighs the other, then the other is more likely as it needs to “catch up.” So in the example above where we had five reds in succession, The Gambler’s Fallacy states black is more likely because ultimately, red and black must on average come up in equal measure.  

Logically, we can see that d’Alembert really should have known better. Every spin of the roulette wheel is an independent event. The wheel and ball neither know nor care what has come before, and the odds of red or black never change.  

4. Cold dealers 

This one is popular among blackjack players. Some dealers seem to go through phases when they are on fire and can’t lose, while others are busting time and again. Gravitate to the cold dealer and get away before he or she heats up and you can’t lose.  

In truth, every dealer is bound by the rules of the house and the turn of the cards. In truth, it doesn’t matter who is turning the cards, and when you look at it in the cold light of day, that has to be the case.  

5. Ball tracking 

Finally, back to the roulette wheel. There are some players, the self-styled “elite spinsters,” who claim they can tell by watching the ball release where it will ultimately come to rest. It is a nice theory, and if anyone could genuinely do that, it would be a winning strategy.  

Unfortunately, even the most sophisticated computer software is unable to negotiate all the variables such as the speed of the ball, friction and the deceleration of the wheel, which are all just as significant as the position the wheel is in at that fraction of a second when the ball is released.  

Perhaps the most compelling argument against the success of ball-tracking strategies, though, is that none of those who claim to be experts have yet come forward to show off their luxury yachts and supercars. Until they do, let’s just continue to enjoy the uncertainty of casino games and hope that luck is on our side.