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 The casino is a place to have fun playing different games. It seems you just need to go in, take a seat and bet some money to start enjoying and winning those games. Looks like casinos are made just to entertain us but is not completely true. All casinos are in the first place businesses so they just want to take your money making you smile.
Your first thought is probably that the casinos cheat. You’re wrong! They don’t have to cheat because all casino games are created to make profit on every bet. In the casinos you can find three categories of games: table games, electronic gaming machines, and random number ticket games such as Keno and simulated racing. Casino games offer to the player the possibility to gain quickly large sums of money but in the same time provide to the casino a long-term predictable advantage, called house edge or casino advantage.
In some casino games you’ll find a skill element which can minimize the casino advantage but is extremely rare that a player has enough skill to completely eliminate the house edge in a casino game.The house edge results from the fact that the casino doesn’t pay winning bets the “true odds” of the game. For example if you roll a dice true odds would be 6 times the amount wagered because is a 1 in 6 probability of each number to appear. The casino may only pay 5.5 times the amount wagered for a winning wager. The house edge is defined as the casino profit expressed as a percentage of the player's original bet. In some games the final bet may be several times bigger than the original bet, so the house edge is related to the original wager to make it easier for the player to estimate how much will lose. Let’s exemplify the house edge on American Roulette. There are 2 zeroes (0 and 00) and 36 numbers: 18 red and 18 black. If you bet $1 on red, your chance of winning $1 is therefore 18/38 and your chance of losing $1 (or winning -$1) is 20/38. In this case the player’s expected value is 18/38 x 1 + 20/38 x (-1) = 18/38 - 20/38 = -2/38 = -5.26%. Therefore, the house edge is 5.26%. After 100 rounds with $1 wagered on each, the average house profit will be 100 x $1 x 5.26% = $5.26. This is the average casino profit from each player if it had millions of players each betting 100 rounds at $1 per round. The casino games have different house edges and for most of them is lot more difficult to calculate it.
Here you have the average hands per hour usually played and the house edge for comparing various games.  |
