Play With House Money

Most people make the mistake of playing with their own money. This makes them anxious and fearful. The house has an edge. So they know that just being there they must be losers. They worry. They lose a little, and bet big to recoup it. Then they worry more. If they ever get ahead, or even if they just get close to being even again, they get conservative so they won't have to worry about losing again. Losing your own money is no fun. And at the back of your mind, you have this awful nagging feeling that you're losing it because you're not clever enough to figure out how to win.

Therefore,

Start the night by assembling some of your dough into a stake. This is what you're comfortable losing. Maybe it's what you can justify to your spouse. Maybe it's what you would have spent on dinner and a movie. Whatever, make certain it's not enough to change your lifestyle if it's gone. For the sake of argument let's say your stake is $50.

Now you say to yourself as follows: "This is not my money. This is the money I already paid to the house for the opportunity of winning a bunch more. This is in fact the house's money. I am not going to play with my money tonight. I am only going to PlayWithHouseMoney."

Now you're hip with the rest of the GamblingPatternLanguage, but at first you're going to go slow. TestTheWater. When your luck runs good, start raising your bet. You can raise it fast or slow, however you like, but if you start to lose, drop to piddly bets. If you nibble away the whole stake, that's it, fun's over, go back to your room and get some sleep.

Now let's say that this night you're doing well. You look down on the table and you've tripled the stake: $150. When you reach that level, you take the original stake and you put it in your pocket. It's not coming back out. So now you know you're already a winner, even if you lose everything else that's on the table, because you have $50 of the house's money in your pocket.

So since you're already a winner, you can start to be more aggressive. That $100 is going to be a litmus now to tell you when to walk. If at any time you lose $100 in a row, stop playing, and pocket your winnings. Your luck has turned, so now you have to do the hard part of the job. Walk away a winner. Cash in what's in your pocket and say, "This is my money now. I will not play with this money, because it is mine. Some other night I will come back here with pretty much the same stake I began with tonight, and that stake won't be my money. I am only ever going to PlayWithHouseMoney."

Do this and you still might not win. But you can't lose.

"You can't lose." Big. You can't lose Big. You can still lose that $50. You can still lose that $50 every night you walk in there. However, in the long run, you should come out ahead.

Why? Simple. Let's say that the odds are staked about 60/40. 6 times out of ten, you're going to walk away down that $50 bucks. 4 times out of ten, you're going to come out with that 50 in your pocket, plus a bit extra. The key here is how much that "bit extra" is. Unlike your losses, your winnings are open-ended. If you can manage to win $75 dollars extra on average, you'll make a profit. The closer to 50/50 you can get the odds, the less you have to make when you win to cover your losses.

Games with potentially large winnings rarely, but sufficiently small enough winnings to come regularly, offer the best chance of covering your losses here. Just remember that you can always lose, though.

If the game is invariable with house odds against you, you will always lose long-term regardless of any kind of money-management strategy as described above. Classic examples of casino games of this nature are craps and roulette. Money management is useful in games where the odds are not always against you such as blackjack and PokerGame. In blackjack the deck goes in cycles of more or less favorable depending on which cards have been played out. If you keep track of this kind of thing ("counting cards") it is possible to beat the house long-term (until they kick you out for counting). In PokerGame although there is a constant drain in the direction of the house (the "rake") there are circumstances where your skill at the table relative to your opponents can compensate and overcome this inherent disadvantage. Hence there are professional blackjack and poker players, but there are not any professional craps or roulette players.--AndyPierce

The original strategy is not about making money gambling, it is about having fun gambling while not getting sucked into not losing your house to a pair of threes. Hee hee. When I first read this I was trying to figure out how a full house loses to a pair of threes. :)

Indeed, there is no strategy that will allow you to win over time against casinos. Even in Blackjack - card counters are easily spotted and removed from play. The point of this page, however, is entertainment, not money-making. If you were going to spend $50 on a night out anyway, and your food and drinks are thrown in for free, then you simply can't lose if you play this way. And every once in a while you get a nice pot. You're happy, the casino is happy, and no harm is done.

I note that many people have won against casinos, but rarely now via gambling itself. Social engineering gets you a long way in smaller casinos. When you're in high-stakes games, they don't like to throw anyone out because they _think_ that you'll eventually lose big.

I also note that roulette is highly predictable based on physics principles. Check out "The Newtonian Casino" sometime.

-- TaralDragon

NevadaRoulette? is a different game than EuropeanRoulette?. The latter can give reasonable odds. The former, never.

My fun game with casinos is to play TwoUpGame? with a twist.

: TwoUpGame? is is an Australian game where two coins are tossed up, and you bet on whether they come down as a pair of heads, or a pair of tails. If they come down head & tail ("odds") then the stake stays on the table and the coins are tossed again, and again, and again ... until either a pair comes up or five odds in a row happens. When the latter happens the house gets all the stakes, no winners (thus they have a 1:32 edge and will eventually come out ahead).

That's the normal game. The twist I add to it is to go there with a friend, he bets on heads, I bet on tails, we do this for a while, and then whoever ends up with all the money buys all the drinks for the rest of the night from their winnings. Once in 32 times we don't get to drink, the rest of the time we do.

You can do the same thing with the RouletteGame? -- one bets black, the other bets red. Winner buys the drinks. Occasionally the house spins 0 or 00 (or 000!) and you go thirsty. TwoUpGame? is better for this though, as it is naturally rowdier which only helps to engender the competitive spirit between two friends, which is the whole point of this twisted game.

-- EricScheid

A lot of comes down to the question of why do you gamble? Is it for fun, or is it to make some money? If it's just for fun, then you can PlayWithHouseMoney, and the only real variable is how long it takes for you to run out of what you're playing with -- that is, how many hours of fun do you get for the money you spent? If you're gambling to make money, you better learn about odds, and fast.