Casino Gambling Advice to Avoid – Tips on Casino Gambling – BestUSCasinos.org

You can often learn as much from examining bad advice as you can from getting good advice. With any luck, what Ive done with this post is provide seven examples of REALLY bad advice and replace it with good advice.

Many times, just doing the opposite of what the bad advice suggests is enough to prevent a disaster. Other times, the bad advice might be appropriate in some circumstances. And sometimes, bad advice just doesnt matter much one way or the other.

In any case, you should know the difference. Here are seven examples of the worst advice about real money gambling Ive ever heard.

Most of the time, the person urging you to get expert advice on who to bet on is the one selling that advice. In the betting world, someone who sells this kind of advice is called a tout. A company which provides multiple experts is a tout service.

These services prefer to be called handicappers or expert handicappers, but a healthy dose of skepticism would be wise when dealing with such companies.

Most of them have websites offering free picks. These are worth what you pay for them, usually. But the idea of getting you hooked on their free picks is to generate interest in their paid picks. Thats how they get you.

Lets look at some of the math behind betting on sports.

Assume youre an average sports bettor who bets $100 per game on a regular basis. Youre required to risk $110 to win $100, which is how the bookmaker makes his money. Just to break even, you need to win over 52% of the time.

And the lines are set so that your probability of winning is 50%. So, you decide to find an expert to make your betting decisions for you. You find a guy who offers a solid pick for Thursday nights NFL game for just $25.

Youre going to be out the $25 no matter what happens, win or lose.

Lets assume that the tout flipped a coin to choose a team. (Thats a likely a scenario, by the way.) 50% of the time, youll lose $135, which includes the $110 you bet on the game, and the $25 you spent on the pick. The other 50% of the time, youll win $75, which is $100 less the $25 pick.

What does this mean for the house edge? $110 $75 is the equivalent of a $35 loss, or $17.50 per bet. What if the tout was picking winners 60% of the time? 60% of the time, you win $75, and 40% of the time, youll lose $135. Thats $45 in positive expectation, and $54 in negative expectation.

In other words, if youre only betting $100, that $25 pick doesnt bring you to break even if the handicapper is right 60% of the time, which is nearly impossible. Even the people in the business admit that 55% is probably the best you can expect from an exceptional handicapper.

If youre betting $1000 on the game, it might make more sense to pay $25 for a pick. But even then, youre looking at a potential win of $975 and a potential loss of $1,125.

If your handicapper is right 60% of the time, thats $585 in positive expected value. You also have $450 in negative expected value, so now you have a profitable pick. You should notice two things about this youre going to be right 50% of the time even if you choose randomly.

And even if the tout is really good at his job, you still have to bet considerably more than the cost of the pick to make even good picks profitable.

Contrary to popular belief, the house doesnt always win. Sometimes, you win. In fact, about 20% of the people who visit a casino in a given day go home from the casino with winnings in their pockets.

This doesnt mean you SHOULD play, but it also doesnt mean you should refrain from playing. It means that the decision is more complicated than that.

No, you probably wont win in the long run, but you might. If you win a huge progressive jackpot of $10 million, you might conceivably be able to play for low stakes for the rest of your life and show a net profit for your casino gambling career.

Thats not likely, though, to say the least. But what about gambling as an entertainment expense? Is it okay to gamble knowing youll probably lose in the long run as long as youre having fun doing it? Of course it is.

The trick is to decide whether youre really having that much fun while youre playing. My dad might have put $2 into the slot machines the entire time we were in Reno together. (We were there for four nights.)

Gambling in a casino didnt seem like fun to him, but I sure enjoyed myself. I came home a winner on that trip, too! I won about $50 net.

This is just the Martingale system, which doesnt work in the long run. The idea is that every time you lose, you double the size of your previous bet. Eventually, you must win, and when you do, youll win back all your previous losses along with a small profit.

Ive seen some gambling experts say that you can grind out lots of small wins this way. But youll eventually run into a situation where you lose so many times in a row that your bankroll will be devastated, and you wont be able to afford the next bet. Or youll run into a situation where the next bet in the progression will be so big that the house wont let you make it because of their betting limits.

Suppose you start with $5 and go on a losing streak in roulette. Most roulette tables with a $5 minimum bet also have a $500 maximum bet, which means youll need to bet the max when you have a certain number of losses in a row.

Most people underestimate how many losses that will be:

If you lose seven times in a row on an even-money bet in roulette, you cant make the next bet because the casino has betting limits in place.

You might think seven losses in a row is next to impossible at the roulette table, but it happens probably once a day in every casino.

This isnt terrible advice unless you think its going to magically make you a winning gambler. In the long run, short-term strategies like win goals and stop-loss limits wont change the fact that the house has a mathematical edge over the player.

A win goal is an amount youre going to win thats going to signify that its time to stop for that session. This would make you a winner But only if you stop and never gamble again.

A stop-loss limit is the same thing, but its an amount youre willing to lose before quitting the session. Its meant to limit how much money youll lose.

This would limit the amount you lose But only if you stop and never gamble again.

The way the math behind gambling works, though, is that youre facing a lifetime gambling session thats been divided into shorter, arbitrary sessions. As far as the gods of luck are concerned, its all one big session.

And the more you gamble, the closer your results will get to the mathematically expected results.

Heres the idea behind this advice: Suppose you place a big bet, maybe $500, on the roulette wheel and win. Now, you have $1000. You decide youre only going to play with the $500 you just won, and youre going to preserve your original stake.

If you think this will make you profitable in the long run, think again.

Once youve won that money, its not the houses money anymore. Its your money. If you continue to gamble with it, you continue to give the casino house edge time to work its magic.

It can be fun to gamble with the houses money. But it can be more fun to pocket your $500 in winnings and buy a nice dinner or some show tickets with your profits.

Some casino games involve a skill element, but most of them are pure chance. Even the games with a skill element, like blackjack and video poker, give the house a mathematical edge over the player.

It doesnt matter how much you practice or how skilled you get. If you play long enough, the house edge will eat up all your money.

The only exception is if you find a real advantage gambling technique and get good enough at it to win consistently over time.

For example, some card counters are profitable in the long run. And to make that profit, they do need to practice and become proficient, both at basic strategy and at counting cards.

Casinos dont make that easy either. Once they realize youre counting cards, theyll usually run you off their blackjack games. Some of them will even ask you to leave the casino entirely.

More nonsense has been written about which slot machines are looser than others than anything I can imagine. The biggest and most popular myth is that the casinos put the best-paying slot machines on the edges of the rows so theyll attract more players.

This myth originates from an interview with a slot machine manager at a casino decades ago. Theres no guarantee that the interview actually took place, and even if it did, theres no guarantee that the slots manager was telling the truth.

Multiple more recent interviews with casino managers and slot machine managers indicate that they do NOT place their slot machines based on how loose or how tight they are.

Even defining those terms is tricky.

A loose slot machine is one thats supposed to pay out more, but even a game with a high hit frequency can have a lower payback percentage than a game with a low hit frequency.

Whats the difference, and how is that possible? Hit frequency refers to how often a spin of the reels results in some kind of prize, regardless of the size of that prize. For example, a slot machine with a hit frequency of 33% will result in a win about one-third of the time.

The payback percentage, on the other hand, is a function of how much money the slot machine pays out versus what it takes in. The deciding factor is not only the probability of a win but also the size of those wins.

You can program a slot machine game to pay off at 1 for 1 odds 50% of the time, and if the rest of the prizes hit seldom and arent big, the payback percentage can be really low.

Youll get plenty of bad advice about gambling. It doesnt even matter what kind of gambling you do. Hopefully, youve learned a thing or two from the advice Ive given against what may be commonly heard. What kind of bad advice have you gotten about gambling?

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Casino Gambling Advice to Avoid - Tips on Casino Gambling - BestUSCasinos.org