It is no more a surprise to a majority of the population that casino gambling has set foot on becoming the most revenue-generating industry in a country. Every year, the trend has been upgrading, and more and more countries are indulging in the gambling funda. Where does all this money come from? A popular saying goes ‘The house always wins’. No matter what strategy you implement, in the long run, this holds. This happens for two main reasons:
- For every win an individual makes, the house always has a share.
- They carefully examine the odds that will cost colossal payout and set them lower than the winning odds. This trick has ever worked for the casinos. Some of them in popular cities like Vegas hire skilled experts to calculate these odds. Now, that’s how crucial it is for them.
The science behind the wins
The primary way by which the casinos make a profit on the random games is by calculating the odds. Odds are the probabilities by which you can calculate your win.
When you consider flipping a coin, you either win heads or tails. So the odds of winning to losing are 1:1, i.e. you either win or lose.
Similarly, if you roll a die, the odds of landing on a 6 is 5:1. On 1:1 odds, you would call even money that is if you bet $100, then you either win or lose it. Whereas, in case of a die, you’d win $500 every time you won and $100, 5 out of 6 times you lose. The same logic is applied in casinos as well. They make a profit by offering pays that are lower than the odds.
If they risked your $110 on coin flipping, then 50% of the time, they’d be making a profit from your money, and for a game of die with 4:1 odds, you’d win the amount only once and the other three times, it would be in the casino’s pocket.
Blackjack
There are a lot of random games on the casino floor, but let’s discuss blackjack because it seems like the one where the house does not have an edge. It might seem like the house has no advantage in this game because it depends mainly on the player’s skills and how well he plays his cards. But there is a flip side. Every time you’re at the table, you have to play first before the dealer, and if you bust you lose all your chips. The same happens if the dealer busts hers. Whatever the case may be, the house will get its profit.
Why people still gamble?
Despite all the “odds“, people still love to spend their money carelessly one game after the other. There could be two reasons for this:
- Poor math education to see how the casino is making a profit from these numbers.
- A simple strategy called short term variance is employed. If you roll a six-sided die six times, there’s a higher probability of getting the same number more than twice. And if it is rolled 6000 times, then it remains equal. Players thrive on this and call it luck. There are always exceptional cases where players make prodigious amounts of money in concise terms.