You know it, I know it: the casino has an edge on every bet. Except for the few advantage players who are, today, more like dust in a wind storm of the desert.
Just about every player can’t beat the house. You can thank the mathematicians for that and the folks who fiddle with the computers for that too. You can thank the casino bosses for short-changing the payouts of bets or setting up a game where the casino simply wins more decisions.
If you are the type of person who thinks it is stupid to play a game where your opponent has an edge over you than you probably don’t play casino games. Why would you? There can be no real reward for that.
Now you can also be the type of person who doesn’t care about that because going to the casinos is fun. Betting is fun. The casino is the single place of true excitement in many people’s lives. That goes without saying. Otherwise, the games wouldn’t have spread to the Internet so fast.
Of course, there are discussions and (fierce) disagreements about what bets are the better of the bad bets and which bets are the worst of the bad bets. In fact, I have a list of bets that I consider good bad bets and the others are degrees of the worst bad bets.
You can see I am not a purist. But there are uber non-purists; players that really have no care or even idea that the bets they are making come in various shades of black. They are hearty (or hardy), often thoughtless, players. If the casino were a church, these hearty (or hardy) players would have many a “bless you” said over them by the casinos’ bosses.
But that doesn’t mean the games have remained stagnant. Many have changed or been tinkered with over the almost 40 years I’ve been playing them.
Good and Bad Tinkering
The favorite table game in the casino is blackjack. It has been number one since Edward O. Thorp had his ground-breaking book Beat the Dealer published in the mid-1960s. That book taught an advantage-play method known as card counting that could, if applied properly, beat the house.
Until that time craps had been the number game, played by those great World War II veterans. But in light of card counting, craps fell to a tie with roulette as the number two game, where it still resides.
Casino players flocked to blackjack. Many of them thought just playing the game would give them an edge over the house. Some of them played what was then called (and is now called) basic strategy the method to play every player hand against the casino dealers’ face-up card.
Basic strategy (then and now) is the way to keep blackjack a very, very close game between player and casino – but it did not give the edge to the player. It did bring down the house edge on most games to almost even. Until the casinos started mucking around with the game, that is.
The 1950s style of blackjack was heavenly. A single-deck game where most of the cards were dealt to the players. Those who played the early form of basic strategy had a hair follicle casino edge to play against.
[Please note: I once played a single-deck game at the Maxim Casino-Hotel in Vegas where every card but one was dealt to the players. The game had surrender too and if you got a blackjack with a five-dollar or more bet you received a ticket worth one dollar that could be used anywhere in the hotel. And what if the deck ran out? They would just shuffle the discards and continue dealing. Best blackjack game I ever played. Somewhere around 1992 or so. My wife, the Beautiful AP, and I stayed in Vegas for eight straight weeks to play that game! We each played two hands too. At least eight hours a day.]
Post 1960s, the casinos started changing the game. They brought in more decks, two decks, four decks, six decks and even eight decks. They put the cut card in shallowly. Fewer cards would be played. That hurt the player who could count those cards.
Today, you can see continuous automatic shufflers at many games. There is no break for the dealer to shuffle in such games because those games just keep going and going and going. Unplayed cards just go right back into the eight decks that are continuously shuffled. There is no way to beat those games other than a hefty dose of good luck. Gamblers who want to win really can’t rely on luck.
Whatever single-deck games remain usually have a blackjack payout of 6 to 5 as opposed to 3 to 2. There are also other limitations on some of those games as well.
Can a competent card counting player of the old school actually beat those new single-deck games? Not really. These were introduced at Bally’s in Las Vegas if I remember correctly in the mid-1990s or thereabouts.
More cards, and heightened security, more or less did in most card counters. But blackjack still reigns supreme as the number one table game.
And What About Craps?
Craps was originally called carps by the Southerners who played the game in and along the Mississippi River towns. It is a hybrid of the British game Hazard. As it slowly progressed up north the Northerners misheard the Southern dialect and thought the game was called craps. And that’s what it became.
It was one of the two favorite World War II games, along with poker.
I will gladly admit that craps is my favorite casino game. Why? Because everything is in the players’ hands. The players shoot the dice and if a player doesn’t shoot, what then? Simple. The next player gets the dice and on the game goes.
The rules are firmly established and the “does and don’ts” of the game are well spelled out. It can be a loud game too.
Every night coming from the craps tables area one can often hear outbursts of applause and ecstatic cheers. Craps is one exciting game when the shooter is hot (unless you are betting against the shooter hitting his point or the numbers but those darksiders are still relatively rare when a shooter has hit a few numbers).
Craps has several excellent bets coming in with house edges well below 2%. It also has a way to reduce the house edge on such bets even more by using the odds bet once those other bets are up on the layout.
The smartest players make the best bets. Period. A BIG BUT coming up now friends. Most craps players make more than one or two bets and many of these players, if not almost most, will also make some of the absolute worst bets offered in the casino.
There are craps bets that come in with house edges in the double digits – yes over 10%! Many just under that and a few over that – way over that!
Through the years, the casinos have tinkered with the bets at craps, usually offering “bonus” bets with astoundingly high house edges.
But craps players are often lured by high-paying bets no matter how awful these bets actually are. Again, players who make these bets are not truly aware of how their prospects are completely dimmed by engaging in such wishful thinking.
For the average craps player, craps is a multiple-bet game. I am thinking many craps players have no idea of what those bad bets make for the casino and how much they cost the player. A close game becomes a “no contest” when a player insists on making many bad wagers.
But over the decades that I’ve played the game many changes have been made. The original craps game I played had two-times (2X) odds; that is, you could add a bet that was double your pass-line bet.
The best one? One hundred times odds (100X). I played this game in Tunica, Mississippi. It was offered at several casinos. No added house edge either on those odds bets! Yes, a five-dollar pass-line bet could see odds of (hold your breath, Timmy) $500! Okay, very few players could make that odds bet but you could add whatever you wanted under $500. It was the single greatest change in craps ever.
It didn’t last too long but I saw it in action. That was a heavenly change for the players. Of course, such an amazing bet didn’t sweep the country. In fact, it didn’t last all that long even in Mississippi.
But other changes? Not so hot, in fact, truly bad. Rotten if you ask me.
Adding side bets that would cost more than double digits to the craps players just made it almost impossible to win even a session unless someone got really hot.
How could someone win who was betting seven or eight or nine or ten or more bets on this, that, or the other thing? Bad bets mostly. That makes craps an almost impossible game to beat except without outlandish heaps of luck.
Today, most craps games have gone away from the double odds game and many will offer 3X or 4X or 5X odds. Prior to the Covid lockdowns many more casinos than ever offered upwards of 10X odds. You won’t see that too much anymore.
Yes, despite all the horrible bets, craps is a great game to play if you play it right.
The Secret Behind Modern Slot Machines
Oh, yes, the slot machines have changed immensely since I first started playing in the casinos.
Most of the old-fashioned slots (circa 1990!) were generally of two types. Type one featured machines that took one, two, or three coins or were hooked into inter-casino progressive machines that could pay out millions with the odds being about 1 in 50 million on a hit. Yes, very, very long odds indeed.
These machines were played with coins and most slot players had as my mother said, “The desire to get a bigger bucket,” in which to hold their coins. If you played slots long enough on a given day your fingers wound up getting somewhat silver from all the “silver” dust floating around in your bucket.
And that is where it stood. Coins, dust, buckets, progressives, and slot clubs for people with players’ cards.
Today’s slot players do not need buckets, little, medium or big. The majority of casinos use credit and credit monitors. And payouts are made at the cashier. You get a slip of paper when you quit playing a machine which tells you how much you have won or lost. If there is anything on that slip of paper, you can cash it in or play it in another machine.
Many slot machines today go with the idea that it is a good device if the player is multiple betting – no not just three “coins” or credits, but multiple different ways to win something or other.
You will see games where the player can play 10 games or maybe more. The amount of money these machines make can be enormous. They have out-craps craps!
In fact, you can often play table games at the machines! Ouch! That certainly hurts…the dealers especially.
In any modern business it is not good enough to make the same money this year as you made last year. Business always requires a bigger return, year after year. And today’s slot machines are geared to making more and more and more. And that’s why you get more games on them and why the decisions can come faster and faster even than that.
Society is Now a Gambler’s Paradise
You can’t escape it. There are so many commercials for online casinos and sports betting that one would think our countries will soon go broke. Maybe so.
I know that the college kids I’ve met all gamble on the games and some (who are old enough) love to go to the casinos.
I guess we shall see what will happen when gambling stays so widespread.
All the best in and out of the casinos!
