- A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Sites
- A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Games
- A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Numbers
Do you feel like you’re losing too much money gambling? If so, that can be a serious problem. You’ll probably find plenty of advice aimed at problem gamblers or gambling addicts. That advice usually amounts to absolute abstinence, which, frankly, is the correct approach—if you’re really a problem gambler.
On the other hand, you might not have an addiction. You might be a recreational gambler who overdid it one weekend. Compare it to the person who goes to a party one weekend and overindulges and wakes up with a hangover. That, by itself, doesn’t qualify one for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. It takes a little more drinking than that.
A player making $10 bets on a single number (with only 1/38 chance of success) with a $100 bankroll is far more likely to lose all of his money after only 10 bets. In the early frontier gambling saloons, the house would set the odds on roulette tables at 27 for 1. A gambler loses 10 times running at roulette. He decides to continue. Playing because he is due for a win, by the law of averages. A bystander advises him to quit, on the ground that his luck is cold. Or are both of them wrong?
If you’re a recreational gambler, here are 10 reasons why you’re losing so much money gambling, and here’s what you should do instead:
1- You’re Placing the Wrong Bets at the Casino
All casino games have a house edge—a mathematical advantage for the casino that’s impossible to beat in the long run. They create this edge by creating a game where the odds of winning are worse than the payout odds. One easily understood example is roulette. A bet on a single number at the roulette table has a 37 to 1 probability of winning. (You have 37 ways to lose, and you only have 1 way to win.) But that bet only pays off at 35 to 1 odds.
If you bet $100 on 38 spins of the roulette wheel, the mathematically predicted results would look like this: You’d win once, and you’d get paid off $3500. You’d lose 37 times, and you’d lose $3700. That’s a difference of $200 over 38 spins, or $5.26 per spin. The house edge for the game is 5.26%.
It’s important to realize that this is a long-term mathematically expected result, and in the short run, the results are random. Your actual results will only start to look more like the mathematically expected results over a long period of time. But the more negative expectation bets you place, and the higher the house edge is, the more money you’ll stand to lose in the casino. In roulette, all of the bets (save one) have the same house edge, but this isn’t true of every game.
A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Sites
Craps, for example, is a game which has some bets with a house edge of well under 2%. But it also has some bets with a house edge of well over 10%. The difference in expected value is tremendous. If you stick with the pass line bet at the craps table, or the come bet, the house edge is only 1.41% But if you start betting on silly stuff like “hard 8,” the house edge is 9.09%.
This means you’ll lose an average of $1.41 every time you bet $100 on the come bet or pass line bet, but you’ll lose an average of $9.09 every time you bet the same amount on the hard 8. So one reason you’re losing so much money gambling is because you’re making bets on propositions where the house has a high edge. Choose games with a lower house edge, and you’ll lose less money.
2- You’re Betting Too Much Money on Each Wager
The way to predict your mathematically expected loss per hour on a gambling activity is to use the following formula, where:
- A = The house edge
- B = The average bet size
- C = The number of bets you make per hour
- A X B X C = Expected hourly loss
Increase any of these factors, and the amount of money you lose per hour goes up. It does you little good to stick with a game where the house edge is 1.41% if you’re just going to start betting $500 per roll instead of $100.
If you’re gambling spending has gotten out of control, consider scaling down the stakes for which you’re playing. If you’re betting $100 per hand on blackjack, you can cut the amount of money you’re losing in half by betting $50 per hand instead.This is true in any gambling activity where you’re fighting a negative expectation. Bet less per wager, and you’ll lose less money in the long run.
3- You’re Using Betting Systems
Some people think that raising and lowering their bet sizes based on the previous round’s results can change the odds in their favor. The most popular of these methods is called the Martingale System, and it involves doubling the size of your wager after every loss until you win.
These kinds of betting systems ignore a few factors, but the most important of these is this: Every bet is on an individual, independent event. You’re not placing a bet that red will come up 8 times in a row. You’re placing a bet on whether a red will come up on the next spin.
What happened on the previous spins has no effect on the probability of getting red on the next spin of the roulette wheel. There are 38 numbers, and 18 of them are red. The probability of getting a result remains 18/38, regardless of what happened on the previous spin, the previous dozen spins, or the previous 100 spins.
The other thing that these betting systems fail to account for are the size of your bankroll and the betting limits at the casino. If you start off betting $10 per spin at the roulette wheel and double your bet after every loss, you don’t need an outrageous losing streak to start putting a serious strain on your bankroll.
Losing 8 times in a row at roulette seems next to impossible, but it happens every 4 or 5 hours. Look what happens to the size of your bet when you hit a losing streak like that:
- $10
- $20
- $40
- $80
- $160
- $320
- $640
- $1280
Keep in mind that if you succeed on bet #8 or #9, your net profit for the entire progression was only $10. The rest of that bet was just to recoup your previous losses. And after losing 7 or 8 times in a row, the odds of winning the next bet are still against you. The probability is still 47.37%, no matter what happened earlier.
No betting system can compensate for having the odds against you in the first place. That’s just not how gambling works.
4- You’re Not Using Basic Strategy in Blackjack
Most people know by now that blackjack offers some of the best odds in the casino. The house edge is less than 1%. But that figure assumes that you’re playing every hand with perfect basic strategy. Every deviation you make from basic strategy adds to the house edge.
The average player probably gives the casino back 2% or more by making basic strategy mistakes. Sometimes this is because the player didn’t bother learning the correct strategy to begin with. Other times, it’s because the player knew the right strategy but ignored it in favor of a hunch.
If you’re going to play blackjack, memorize basic strategy and use it on every hand. This will limit your losses. The more you deviate from basic strategy, the more money you’ll lose on average over time.
5- You’re Playing Slot Machines
The most expensive game to play in any casino is the slot machine. It combines lousy odds with a high rate of play, which is devastating to your bankroll. It increases the average expected loss dramatically. The average slot machine player gets in about 600 spins per hour. At $3 per spin, you’re putting $1800 per hour into action. Contrast that with a blackjack player wagering $10 per hand at a reasonably crowded table. He’s probably lucky to get in 100 hands per hour, which means he’s only risking $1000 per hour.
When you account for the dramatic difference in house edge, the numbers become even more staggering. $1800 worth of action on a slot machine with an 8% house edge results in a loss of $144. $1000 worth of action on a blackjack game with a 0.5% house edge results in a lot of $5. That’s a 30-fold difference.
Play whatever you want to in the casino, including slot machines, but if you think you’re losing too much money too fast, you should get away from the slots.
6- You’re Playing Too Many Hands at the Poker Table
One of the keys to winning at poker in the long run is tight-aggressive play. The first part of that is probably the more important part if you’re losing too much money playing poker.
Tight and loose are 2 ways of describing how selective you are with which hands you play and how far you continue with them. Tight players fold most hands and only play the hands that are strong. Loose players, on the other hand, play lots of hands. Loose players might win more pots, but it’s only because they’re involved in more pots.
Tight players lose less money on pots where they stand to lose. You can think of being a tight player as being similar to being a horse in a race who refuses to run unless he has a head start against his opponents.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put money in the pot. Betting and raising are keys to aggressive play, which is the 2nd half of a winning poker strategy. But in terms of losing less money, the first trick you should learn is how to fold a lot. Even tight-passive players lose less money than loose-passive players.
7- You’re Gambling with Money You Can’t Afford to Lose
A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Games
Have you ever heard the expression, “Scared money always loses?” It’s true.Scared money is money you shouldn’t have been betting in the first place. It’s money you can’t afford to lose. Since you can’t afford to lose that money, you make decisions that aren’t mathematically optimal. You also recklessly chase losses in a desperate attempt to get even.
Let’s say you need $1750 to pay the rent this month, and you only have $2000 to last until next payday—which is after the rent is due, by the way. You go to the casino with all $2000 in your pocket, but in your mind, you’re not willing to lose more than $250.
You get to the blackjack table, and you have $100 down on a hand, and you split. Then you re-split. Now you have $400 in action. Then suppose the dealer winds up with a total of 21, and all 4 of those hands of yours lose. You have $1600 left and can’t pay the rent.
So you think, well, I already can’t pay my rent—maybe I can catch up and get ahead by placing a couple of bigger bets. So you bet $200 on the next hand, with the intention of just getting in enough hands to break even for the night. This time you get a hand where the correct play is to double down, and you do so. But you still lose. Now you’re down to $1200. You’re going to lose a lot of money if you’re playing with scared money.
In poker, you’ll be timid and less likely to bet and raise when you should. On casino table games, you’ll raise the size of your bets later in the session to try to get even. None of these moves are optimal, and they’ll cause you to lose more money than you should.
8- You Really Do Have a Gambling Problem
It’s not my place to diagnose whether you’re a problem gambler or not. That’s for you to decide. I can offer some clues to look for, though.
If you’ve ever done any of the following, you might consider getting some help for a potential gambling problem:
- You’ve missed work because of your gambling.
- You’ve felt remorseful after gambling.
- You’ve gambled until you were completely broke.
- You’ve sold something or hocked something to gamble.
- You’ve lied about your gambling activities.
You can find a list of 20 questions to think about if you’re concerned about your gambling behavior here. That’s from the Gamblers Anonymous website, but that’s not the only game in town when it comes to getting help for a gambling problem.
Getting help is crucial, but I’m a believer in getting professional help as well as the support and fellowship of people who have experienced similar problems. Find a licensed professional counselor to talk with, too. Gambling addiction ruins lives, so don’t let it ruin yours.
9- You’re Obsessed with Climbing the Ladder of the VIP Club
I have a friend who visits the Winstar Casino more often than he’d care to admit. He has recently been climbing the ladder in the players club there, and he gets free food and rooms all the time. To pull this off, he had to gamble a lot more than he probably would have otherwise. And the way negative expectation games work is to drain your money the longer you stay in the game and the more you play.
Since your rewards are based on the amount of money you wager over time, if you want to climb the ladder by earning more points, you must spend more time playing games where the odds are against you.And since the long-term expectations tend to show up as you get more time in at the games, you’re more likely to lose what the casino expects you to lose the more time you spend playing.
And let’s face it. The percentage that the casino awards you for your play is so paltry in comparison to the house edge that it’s pitiful. Most casinos award you 0.2% or so in rewards. That might go up to 0.3% or 0.4% as you climb the VIP player club ladder. The house edge on most casino games, though, is at least 10 times that much. Most casino games have a house edge in the 2% to 4% range.
Blackjack and video poker are exceptions, but it’s all but impossible to make a living with either of those games even if you play profitably and optimally. Don’t get sucked into the trap of thinking you need to play more to get more player rewards. That’s a recipe for losing more money.
10- You’re Not as Good at Betting on Sports as You Think
It’s hard to make a profit betting on sports. The vig creates a situation where a guy who’s right with his picks 50% of the time is bound to lose. That’s because the book requires you to wager $110 on a 50/50 proposition to win $100. Most people overestimate how well they pick winners. They think that they’re better than they are, and since they’re not keeping careful records anyway, it’s easy for them to claim they’re breaking even or showing a small profit.
Such bettors are usually lying to themselves and everyone else about how successful they are at betting on sports. If you’re serious about losing less money gambling, start keeping careful records of how you do each day or week when betting on sports. Just track how much money you’ve won or lost on each bet.
Do this for a month or two, and I can guarantee you’ll be surprised at what your actual results look like when compared to how you thought you were doing. This doesn’t make you delusional, by the way. It makes you human. It’s human nature to have selective memory. You’ll naturally remember the winning bets more than the losing bets. That’s why keeping written records is so important.
Conclusion
So you’ve been losing too much money gambling? It’s almost certainly because of one of the 10 reasons listed above. That’s good news, too, because once you’ve put your finger on the problem, you can solve it.
With each of the reasons for losing money listed above, I’ve tried to include a piece of advice about how to stop losing so much money for that reason. What other reasons can you think of that might be causing you to lose so much money gambling?
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I write a lot of blog posts with specifics about how to play casino games – both table games and gambling machines. I try to include strategies for increasing your odds of winning, too.
But I suspect that some of the concepts in those posts might be a little advanced for the average beginner.
For them, I offer this post about general gambling concepts that casino players should understand before ever buying chips, signing up for the players club, or inserting money into a gambling machine.
The Casino Has Stacked the Odds Against You – Using Math
The casinos don’t cheat, per se. They have no control over the outcome of their games. The blackjack player is dealing from a randomly-shuffled deck. The croupier at the roulette table has no influence on where the ball lands.
What the casinos do, though, is put the odds on their side. The house edge – the advantage that the casino has over the player – is usually expressed as a percentage.
Depending on which casino game you’re playing, the house edge varies from between 0.5% and 15%.
The longer you play, the more likely you are to lose some or all of your money.
Most people think that even money bets are like a coin toss, with the casino having a 50% chance of winning and the player having a 50% chance of winning. That’s not how it works.
Any time you place an even-money bet – a bet where you’ll lose as much as you’ll win and vice-versa – the casino has a slightly higher than 50% probability of winning, and you have a slightly lower than 50% probability of winning.
Usually a game has a simple “gimmick” that gives them the edge. In roulette, for example, the numbers are all red or black – except for the 2 green 0s. Those 2 numbers give the casino its edge.
In blackjack, the player acts first, which means she’ll have the opportunity to bust and lose. Even if the dealer busts, the player has already lost his money on that hand.
In slot machines, if you have a 1 in 10 shot at winning a prize, you’ll probably only get 7 for 1 on your money.
More About the House Edge
The house edge is something that operates in the long run. In the short term, anything can happen, win or lose.
Let’s look at an example using roulette. Dice gambling game.
You place a single $5 bet on black at the roulette table and lose. That’s an actual loss of $5, or 100%, even though the house edge is 5.26%.
It would be impossible, in fact, to lose 5.26% of a $5 bet on a single bet.
But the more you bet, the closer the number gets to the expectation.
Let’s say you place 10 of those same bets in a row, and after you’ve finished, you’ve lost a total of $20. (You won several bets, but you lost more bets.) You put $50 into action, so that $20 loss represents a 40% loss – still much higher than the expected loss percentage.
Now let’s say you place 100 of those same bets in a row. You’ve put $500 into action. And when your playing session is over, you’ve lost $75, or 15% of your total action.
You’ll notice that as we get more bets into action, the closer the actual loss gets to the expected mathematical loss.
But even at 1000 bets, is possible to come up with results wildly divergent from the expectation. It wouldn’t be unusual to put $5000 into action and see a net loss of $75, which would represent just a 1.5% hold for the house.
Once you get into the 100,000 bets category, though, you’ll get within 0.05% of the house edge in terms of your actual results.
How long does it take to make 100,000 bets if you’re an average gambler?
If you’re playing at a roulette game where you’re able to place 50 bets per hour, you’re looking at 2000 hours. That’s the equivalent of a full-time job for a year.
If you’re a casino, though, you’ll get those kinds of results fast – let’s say you have 6 tables operating 24 hours a day with an average of 3 players at the table at any given time.
6 X 24 X 3 = 432, which means you’ll hit 100,000 bets in less than 25 days – or less than a month.
Generating monthly and quarterly profits becomes easy for a casino because of the volume it’s able to do.
The Grind Is Another Concept to Understand
“The grind” is just the cumulative effect of the house edge repeated over time. It’s the phenomenon that results in most casino players losing all their money during their trip to the casino. Think of it as being like a negative interest rate on a savings account, only instead of being applied monthly, quarterly, or annually, it’s applied every time you place a bet.
Let’s say you take $300 to the casino, and you bet $10 per spin on roulette. If you’re alone at the table most of the time, you might be able to get 50 bets in per hour, or $500 per hour into action.
You’ll win some bets, lose some bets, and eventually see results similar to the house edge of 5.26%.
You only need about $5700 in action to lose $300, so if you play for 11 or 12 hours, you’re likely to lose all your money – not just 5.26% of it.
In other words, if you bet $5700 on a single bet, you wouldn’t necessarily lose the entire amount – you’d either win it or lose it.
But by repeatedly betting a much smaller amount, you’re exposing each bet to that house edge, and you’ll eventually lose all your money.
Casino Game Strategies Make a Difference (But Only with Some Games)
Not every bet at every casino game has the same house edge. For example, you might be playing a blackjack game with a house edge of 1%. That edge only applies to your outcome, though. Some blackjack games offer an additional side bet on a progressive jackpot. If you place that bet, you might face a house edge of 15% on it.
In roulette, the house edge on almost every bet at the table is the same, 5.26%.
But one bet, the 5-number bet, has a house edge of 7.89%.
In craps, you face a bewildering number of bets, all of which have a different house edge. The most basic bet in craps, the pass line bet, has a relatively low house edge of just 1.41%.
But some of the other bets – the proposition bets – have a house edge of between 11% and almost 20%.
Also, in some games, like blackjack and video poker, how you play each hand matters. Imagine if you insist on hitting any total of 19 or less in blackjack.
You’d obviously lose more money than a player who only hits a total of 16 or lower.
Neither of those strategies is ideal, but one is obviously less ideal than the other.
If you don’t want to lose all your money at the casino, spend some time studying the appropriate strategies for the games.
Your Average Loss Is More Important than the House Edge
You’ll see lots of gambling writers dissing keno and the lottery for having such a high house edge, but they might do well to consider the concept of average loss, too.
If the house edge on the lottery is 50%, and I play a single $2 ticket per week, my expected loss is $1 per week, or $52 per year.
If I play video poker on a machine where the house edge is 1%, and I play 600 hands per week at $1.25 each, I’m looking at $7.50 in average losses per week.
The house edge on video poker is much lower, but it doesn’t account for how much you’re betting or how many bets per hour you’re making.
Sausage party game. When comparing gambling games, look at all the factors that add up to your average loss – the amount you’re wagering, the house edge, and the amount of time you’re going to spend playing.
You Can Be a Savvier Casino Gambler than Most People
Some people might say that the savviest move you can make with casino gambling is to fold your money in half and put it in your pocket. They’d be right, as far as that goes, but that’s not much fun.
You can still gamble in casinos and be smart about your money management though.
You just need to keep some simple things in mind:
A Gambler Loses Ten Times Running At Roulette Numbers
Use win goals and stop loss limits. You’ll find plenty of gambling writers dissing these concepts, but without them, you could gamble until you go broke on every trip. That’s NOT smart (or fun). If you’re willing to lose $100, quit gambling when you’ve lost that much. If you’re happy winning $100, quit gambling when you’ve won that much and go home.
Play low house edge games using the appropriate strategy. You’ll do a lot better in the casino playing single-deck blackjack using basic strategy than you will if you sit in front of a slot machine mindlessly spinning the reels all day.
Slow down. The single biggest factor that affects your average loss is how many bets you make per hour. Take breaks. Play slowly. You’ll lose less money in the long run, and you’ll be more likely to win.
The Gambler’s Fallacy and Betting Systems
The Gambler’ Fallacy is the idea that your previous outcomes affect the probabilities of your subsequent outcomes. In other words, if the ball has landed on red 8 times in a row in roulette, you’re committing the Gambler’s Fallacy if you think the odds of the ball landing on red on the next spin are lower (or higher).
There are winning and losing streaks, but it’s impossible to predict when those streaks will begin and/or end.
Betting systems operate from a perspective of the Gambler’s Fallacy. Betting systems involve lowering or raising the size of your bet based on what happened on your previous bet (or on several of your previous bets).
Gambling systems can be fun, and you can win money using one, but don’t make the mistake of thinking a betting system will help you win at gambling in the long run.
Conclusion
When you’re familiar with some of the gambling concepts in this post, you’ll make different decisions as a casino player as a matter of course.
And these aren’t the only nuances to think about when gambling online or in a casino. They’re just a starting point.
But everyone starts somewhere.