Comments on: Smart Gambling

By: smart

smart — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:41:50 +0000

I play Roulette for fun – My challenge is not spending all the money in a few spins. I don’t mind loosing a predefined sum as long as I enjoy. The same goes for blackjack since it is difficult to perform the advanced strategies, I know I’m about to lose.
Poker is different, although it involves luck, it also depends on knowing your odds and your poker face.

By: Rory

Rory — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:00:25 +0000

Roulette has one of the worst house edges in the casino for the player. Basic Strategy blackjack is one of the best for the player.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:04:28 +0000

The boom of TV Poker has added a new pool of gambling victims. As Jeremy said, poker puts you against other real people and the luck of the cards, not you against the house and the luck of the cards. An increasing supply of people hoping to become tv superstars, without having the skill, certainly favors poker players who know what they’re doing. I don’t limit my time in Vegas to the poker table because other forms of gambling are entertaining as well, but poker is the one game where I win the most often. Of course, as with all the games, I often lose at poker as well. Gambling to become rich, bad idea. Gambling for entertainment, in moderation, sure!

By: DebtKid

DebtKid — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:06:19 +0000

Smart Gambling? Hmmm…sounds like an oxymoron to me. I gambled for awhile…that didn’t turn out so well…yeah…

By: MoneyNing

MoneyNing — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:25:19 +0000

I agree that the casino is MUCH more entertaining but I can pretty much buy a lottery for $2 while I cannot do much with $2 in a casino.

With $2, I can go to the 1 cent slot machines and pretend I’m playing and get free drinks but that’s about it :)

By: California Beach Vacations

California Beach Vacations — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 23:40:09 +0000

I think a better idea for gambling, as other have said, is to play games that have some skill behind it. Blackjack, even if you don’t count cards, you can learn the best strategies for each playing situation, that can heavily increase your odds. Also, in poker, learning to play the game well will increase your chances to heavily win.

By: her every cent counts

her every cent counts — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:22:03 +0000

I lost $100 playing online poker once. And I learned my lesson.

By: The Digerati Life

The Digerati Life — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:28:17 +0000

I know enough not to put money down on something that I suck at. So no gambling for me!

By: Adfecto

Adfecto — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:16:34 +0000

Every time I start to think I’m good at poker (and maybe should up the stakes) I take a bad beat. It is nature’s way to remind me that I can’t take the stress and frustration of putting any REAL money at risk to a game that involves luck and probability. Lady luck is never my friend for long.

By: guinness416

guinness416 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:56:16 +0000

Well I can tell you definitively how NOT to make millions by gambling, and that’s to back the Irish rugby team. A decade of losses can’t lie! Stuff like online poker and casino gambling has always left me fairly cold, personally. The odds may be better but between the lack of light, the garish decor and the unpleasant table-mates it’s no fun at all.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:09:04 +0000

Back in 2006 I made about 10K in two months doing something called online casino bonus whoring. It basically turned the casino house edge into an advantage for the gambler. I’ll see if I can explain…the casino would offer a match bonus of say $200 on a $200 deposit. The catch is you have to wager 20x the sum of the deposit and bonus…in this case 8000 ((200 + 200) x 20). You could play almost any offered game to clear the bonus, but the best one to clear the bonus was blackjack. If you played optimal blackjack (using a cheat chart if you have to) the house edge would be roughly 0.5%. So you would expect to lose 0.5% of 8000…or $40 of your total. So your expected take was $160. It was SOOOOOO easy to do. Not to mention many casinos had not just initial deposit bonuses, but monthly bonuses that you could do over and over again. Of course the US government, in their quest for securing freedom for its citizens, has passed the UIGEA act and made moving money around to these casinos extremely tough, if not impossible and killed the whole thing. Some people can still do it today with poker, although it is harder (and slower) to bonus whore via poker as opposed to casinos. People have told me that even before I started (in 2006), casino bonus whoring was even better – you could really make a full time income on it easily. Maybe our gov’t will wise up and get these conservative religious kooks out of office and get back to protecting our freedoms, instead of curtailing them.

By: Give Me Blog

Give Me Blog — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:47:38 +0000

Yes the martingale strategy never loses…that is, except when you lose $2,550 trying to win $10.

By: Dividendgrowth

Dividendgrowth — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:31:21 +0000

I never gamble, but if I did, I would play the martingale strategy playing roulette. Red/Black double down.. ;-)

By: Mrs. Micah

Mrs. Micah — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:18:23 +0000

There’s actually a book at my library on how to maximize your chance of willing at Powerball. I want to rip that book from end to end, because we’re a poor county and it seems downright predatory to have such a book.

By: Give Me Blog

Give Me Blog — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:03:28 +0000

I agree with Matt’s friend. It’s a stupid tax.

Instead of the casinos, win money at my new site. You pay nothing and you get a chance to win hundreds of dollars. You just have to leave a comment. There’s no registration or fees.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:51:56 +0000

I calculate the odds at (1/38)^4 = 1 in 2,085,136.

I go to Vegas annually, but I don’t try to get rich there. There is a problem with your probability logic, though. There are 36 numbers, a zero, and a double zero on the typical roulette wheel (some just have one zero). Your odds of picking the right number on your first bet are 1/38 (2.63%) on a double zero table and 1/37 (2.7%) on a single zero table. Your odds of picking the right number on your second bet are 2.63% and 2.7%, respectively. You have the same odds on every bet. This is a very important distinction. Consider this:

The single best thing to happen to roulette (from casinos’ perspective) in the last 50 years is the invention of the historical display. Why? Because people think of cumulative odds such as what you used to calculate the 1 in 2 million chance of winning. People see a roulette table that has come up red 5 times in row, and think “what are the odds that it will be red 6 times in a row?” Technically, the probability is (18/38)^6 = 1.13%. So they think there’s a 98.9% chance the next spin will come up black. In fact, the odds that the next spin will come up black are 18 in 38. The roulette wheel doesn’t remember what it landed on last, it doesn’t act according to odds.

The only certainty in a casino is that you lose money on each bet. With your example of picking a single number, you’re odds of being right are 1/38. The payout is only 35 to 1. Since you get your bet back, you receive 36 units for every unit bet. This means the house edge (casino’s charge for letting you bet) is 2 units or 2/38=5.26%. This is the edge on almost all roulette bets (it’s higher if you bet the 0,00,1,2,3 combination), which means for every $100 you bet on the roulette wheel, you should expect to lose $5.26. The longer you play, the closer your results will be to these true odds. That is how the casinos get rich, making a nickel on every dollar bet. When you get the feeling you’re gonna get rich, just walk outside and look at all of the billion-dollar buildings around you and remember who makes the money in Vegas. Then go back in and have fun without losing everything and without being disappointed you’re not leaving with millions.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:42:00 +0000

We just went to one of the new casinos built by us, and they have an official world poker tour room, so that is where we’re starting to spend time. This way you don’t have to worry so much about the house odds, and it is basically you against real people and the luck of the cards.

I wouldn’t consider myself a great player, but I’m good with probability and risk management, so with my small amount of money I play with, I usually come out ahead. My wife and I walked away from the table with almost $200 in winnings the other week. That won’t make me a millionaire, but it is better than losing $200 in 30 minutes just dumping it into some slot machine or playing another game with a high house edge.

Speaking of poker, we have a tournament tonight, so hopefully I can continue my winning streak.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:19:34 +0000

Realistically the only two ways to make money ‘gambling’ are to count cards while playing blackjack (which is cheating and illegal in some places) and the other is becoming a good poker player. Although I’m not sure if I’d consider poker really gambling either. The reality is counting cards and being a great poker player are hard to do. Just not really feasible.

I used to work with a guy who had an interesting definition for playing the lottery – ‘Its a tax on the stupid’