Are slot machines a bad bet? Is playing a progressive machine a waste of money? I heard the odds in 3 card poker really favor the house. Are the hard ways in craps all sucker bets?
To answer these questions we need to examine the law that governs every casino on earth? Nope it’s not the law that’s named after the Senator
Sarbanes and Representative
Oxley. It’s the same law that allows multibillion dollar corporations like the MGM Mirage to own 14 hotels on the strip.
It’s called
“The Law of Large Numbers” and simply stated it says “as the number of trials in a random process increases, the average of these observations will be close to the mean”. HUH?
The casino has a built in advantage in every bet they book and every slot machine on the floor. The House Edge (HE) is 1.41% on the pass line in craps, 15% on the penny slots, 5.22% on Caribbean Stud, and 3.51% on Let It Ride. This is how they pay for the hotel and things like the Bellagio Fountain Show.
This edge combined with the ability to accept a large number of bets is how they profit from the Law of Large Numbers.
So what does this mean to you and me on vacation in Las Vegas? Pro gamblers are more than happy to tell you how to spend your money. They use computers to simulate millions and millions of hands then use that math to determine what decision you should make when dealt a given hand and they are more than happy to sell you this expertise.
So what’s the flaw in this logic?
You are not likely to play a million hands of anything in your lifetime. For people like us gambling is a form entertainment and
not employment. The professional gambler needs to spend as much time on the game as possible (to get the
Law of Large Numbers working for them). But for us regular folk anything can and does happen in the short term and your vacation is like a pebble in the Grand Canyon of time compared to the total number of hands, slot pulls and rolls of the dice booked by the casino.
At the California Hotel they have a wall full of plaques for people who’ve held the dice for over an hour. But for every one of those “Golden Arms” there are ten thousand “Tin Arms” who held the dice for a much shorter period of time.
Last year the casinos made $11.8 billion dollars just from gaming. How much of that was yours? My guess is your contribution was a very small amount of that large number (or you need to adopt me).
Some folks enjoy the grind of gaming… they’ll track a craps table or play blackjack for hours, agonizing over every decision… if this is how you enjoy your vacation, great.
However if stressing out over the difference between a 1% or 10% house edge is not your idea of fun
“Forgettabout it”! If your gambling session is 3 hours instead of 3 hours and 5 minutes does it really matter?
Our time in the casino is so small ANYTHING can happen!
The next time you “Go Vegas” think about
Elmer Sherwin, he’s the only person ever to win the Megabucks Jackpot twice! Twenty one years after his first win ($4.6 Million), at age 92 he hit it again for $21 million dollars. Depending on who you talk to the odds of hitting a Megabucks jackpot are about one in 50,000,000 and manufacturer of the super slot, IGT said they could not compute the odds of one person winning twice.
One of gambling’s great ironies is that professional gamblers would never waste their money on a progressive slot machine but that’s the only game that Elmer Sherwin ever plays. Who’s won more money?
Next month here on Oceanic’s Around Hawaii, Title 31 what to expect the next time you’re in the casino (I was gonna write about that this month but needed to do more research).
Good Luck! For the latest Vegas news and more
Kimo’s Vegas visit us at
www.kimosvegas.com.
