- I'm Yuchun Lee, professional blackjack player
and a former member of the MIT card counting team.
I'm here to answer your question from Twitter.
This is "Casino Odds Support."
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First up, imroulettestar.
"What casino games has the best odds?"
If you don't have any skills,
the best odds is by far baccarat.
You will lose about 50 cents for ever $100 you put out.
If you play for a long time, you still lose money,
it's still the least amount of money you can lose,
if you have no skills.
The best game out there, if you do have skill,
I believe, is blackjack.
If you are a regular player, you walk into a casino,
you'll lose somewhere around
$1.50 to $3 per $100 that you bet.
If you are professional blackjack players,
you will be able to win $1.50 to $3 from the casino
the other way around.
From ReactGPT, "What is the worst casino game
in terms of odds?"
There's no question the worst game in a casino
are the slot machines.
Odds range anywhere between 80% to 99% payout.
That means when you put $100 in
you may only get $80 out or $99 out.
The next question is from Boomloaded.
"Can casino kick you out for winning too much?"
Most of the casino don't kick you out for winning
because they believe the law of large number
will eventually help the casino win back any money
that you've won in the short period of time.
This is the concept that in statistics
no matter how random something is
when you do a lot of these random events together
at some point there's a norm that comes out.
That's called the law of large number.
However, if a casino found out you are a professional
and you have an edge over the casino,
the only law on the book
that a casino can kick a player out
is through the trespass law.
Then they will kick you out,
and in fact they have to, otherwise they will go bankrupt.
Nighthawkkz, "How is the house edge calculated?"
Every game has a different edge
and the way they do this is through what's called
a Monte Carlo simulation.
You simulate millions and millions of these hands
and based on that simulation and the outcome,
you can compute what the expected win or loss is.
This is how a professional blackjack team figured out
what is the optimal hand to play.
Twobobsquirt, "Getting no luck at all in the roulette.
Is there a trick to it?"
Unfortunately, there's no way to win in a roulette as is.
And part of the reason is you can bet red or black,
if it lands in these greens, you'll basically lose.
The reason the casino have an edge
over the player in roulette
are these two green numbers here.
There is however, a way to win in roulette
and that happens when you step into a very old,
not well-maintained casino
where the roulette wheel itself is not balanced.
When it's not balanced there are parts of the wheel
that get less probable of a chance of landing the ball
in the slots along that area.
And you observe that over a long period of time
you can actually beat the casino by just eliminating
as little as two to three numbers.
Casino_Bloke, "What are the odd of winning slot machines?
How does volatility work in slots?"
In some states, the range to which is legally allowed
for the casino to set the dial could be as low as 80%
and as high as 99%.
That means, you know, for every $100 you bet
the casino can set it so that you will win back
only $80 out of it.
So, slot machines has a dial that casino can tweak
and create the odds that they want for their business.
They don't change these number easily.
It requires a whole committee to come down
and agree on this is what they need to do.
But in a more sort of off-Strip, shady casino
we have heard story from insiders that busy, you know,
Super Bowl nights and whatnot, they literally crank up this
so they can make more money.
The next question is from data36_com.
"Why are people losing at casinos?
They ignore a few statistical concepts like:
expected value, hot hand fallacy, probability in general."
Think about expected value as the mathematical truth
of how much money you are winning or losing.
Most of the players in the casino, most of the game,
you have a negative expected value.
That means over time law of large number will take over
and you will lose money.
Hot hand fallacy is the concept of streaks.
A lotta players when they sit at a table they keep winning
and when they're winning they're like,
"I'm in a hot streak."
When in reality, every hand is completely independent.
But randomly, over a short period of time,
you could have lots of winning hands one after another.
And again, the concept of all of these
is rooted in the math of probability.
The law of large number eventually takes over.
The expected win or lose will eventually play out.
The next question is from kadafeather.
"What is the best blackjack strategy?"
There's actually a perfect way to play your hand.
And the perfect way is based on
the cards you have in front of you
against the face up card from the dealer.
There's a mathematical way that pair in these wins.
And I have here a pretty standard,
what's called a basic strategy chart.
You can Google these and find a lot of variations of it.
And by the way, there's small variations of these,
depends on different casinos, different rules they have,
there's a slight variation.
But if you don't know how to count cards
and you memorize what to do with each hand
against every single combination of the dealer's hand,
you will minimize your loss in blackjack down to
around 60 cents per $100.
Arta_chris, "I'm not gonna ask how to do it,
but how does card counting work?"
The principle of card counting is really around
tracking how much face cards and aces are left.
And the rationale is that when there are more aces
there's a higher chance of either the player
or the dealer hitting blackjack.
Except in most casinos, if the player hit blackjack
they get paid time and a half.
When the dealer hit blackjack
they just get your money, right?
So, because you have that time-and-a-half advantage,
when there's higher odds to hit blackjack
player has an edge. That's one.
And two, the rule of blackjack,
the dealer has to hit their hand until 17.
When there's a lot of face cards left in the shoe
the dealer will bust more often.
EDEOT69, "Why do casinos kick you out
when you do card counting?
This is not cheating, it is a skill."
It is not cheating, right, we're using our brain,
that's why it's completely legal.
In the state of New Jersey,
casinos are not allowed to kick players out,
so, they have other means of ruining the game for us.
So, for example, in the game of blackjack
they will put the cut cards way up in the front
so that you basically cannot possibly count and win.
Some casino will use what's called
continuous shuffle machine, where they have a machine
that shuffles the cards continuously.
In those situations,
there's really no way you can beat the casino.
Tradingsumo1, "Why do casinos have table limits
if the odds are in their favor?"
Table limits are set up
to bust a particular type of algorithm
called the Martingale algorithm.
And the algorithm goes like this.
I bet dollar. If I win I'm gonna take the dollar I win
and rebet a dollar.
But if I lose that hand, I'm gonna double my bet.
If I stack away the wins I have
and for every hand I lose I double,
eventually the streak of losing will break.
Otherwise, if you have a lotta money, if I'm a billionaire,
I can go to a casino and just use that algorithm
and I can make money.
Wildgoodietours, "Does craps have any type
of advantage play?"
Unfortunately, you can never win in crap.
However, there is a loophole in some of the casinos
in the following way.
So, in crap you have the initial bets,
and after the initial bet, if the roller didn't hit seven
you will have a follow-on bet.
The follow-on bets are even odds.
There's no advantage to the casino, or the player,
in the follow-on bet.
So, one strategy with playing craps
is you back bet anybody else.
So, if you have a friend or even a stranger,
who put the initial bet, let's say $100,
then you can have the secondary bet.
Going forward in that round,
you can bet as much money as possible on the second bet
up to the maximum allowed by the casino.
And that's even odds. That means you can play
for a long period of time
and theoretically you won't lose money.
And if you get a drink for free you come out ahead.
Click2Launch, "What is your best poker strategy?"
The best poker strategy is to get really, really good
at poker to begin with.
In non-tournament poker, the way you win money
is to frankly, sit around tables with other players
who are not as skilled as you
and have a lotta money to lose.
Informal teammate of ours, who retired from blackjack,
end up building a software that he used to monitor
all the online poker sites that he can get into
and basically screen scrape
and look at all the different tables that's out there.
And the algorithm rings a bell for him
when he detect that there is somebody who's not that good
and have a lot of money to throw around.
And it rings a bell, he jumps into those table
and beat them and take their money.
VubblePOP, "How do they catch cheaters in Las Vegas?"
There are some casinos that have RFID embedded chips
in the actual chips that are being put out.
And the main purpose is not to catch
card counters or cheats, but it's really to keep track of
how much money the player put out
because that's a way to compute and figure out
what type of perks, or what type of players,
or detecting whales, et cetera.
And sometimes through those RFID chips
they can detect anomalies
from the statistics they're seeing.
And from those they will flag these players
and people will then pay more attention to them
to make sure there is no cheating going on.
Bobvocado, "You think every slot machine has the same odds?"
The answer is no.
There's tons of different slot machines.
Now, technically there is a type of slot machine
you can actually make money, right?
And that is part of a whole class of slot machine
called progressive slot machine.
You may have seen these in a casino where the concept is
basically over time as the player lose money,
the machine build up a bank
and the payout increases over time.
But once somebody win a jackpot or certain combination
it empties out the bank.
So, theoretically if you walk up to a machine,
over a certain threshold these machine will actually pay out
more than the money you pay in.
So, the strategy for these progressive machines is
that you walk up to the machine,
you look at how much is in the bank,
if it's above a certain number,
you basically will play that machine until the bank breaks.
Seegz, "I lost 400 at a roulette table
in 10 minutes last night.
What are the odds there were eight reds in a row?"
The odds of eight reds in a row
is two to the power of eight, which is 256.
So, it's one out of 256 times
you will have eight reds in a row.
Very unfortunate, sorry to hear that.
TimSimcox1, "Gambling at casinos is voluntarily
participating in a game that is openly acknowledged
to be rigged. Why do people do it?"
There are people who actually value the thrill
of making money a whole lot more
than the misery of losing money.
Those are the true gamblers.
When they make a $100, they are so much more happier
than if they lose $100.
By the way, most people are the other way around.
If you lose $100, you feel a whole lot worse
than the joy of winning $100.
And usually that's how you can tell
whether somebody's a gambler or not.
From VonScharff, "Which casino game
makes the house the most money?"
For most casino, the game that make the most money
are the slot machines.
And the reason the slot machines make casino money
is there's no labor involved.
You can set up, you know, hundreds of these machines
and they're just there taking up electricity,
but they're making money every hour
that there's a player sitting in front of 'em.
StevenWilton, "Why do you always split aces
and eights in blackjack?"
If you got two aces, the Monte Carlo simulation says
you're better off splitting those aces
so that the two hands that you result in
will give you higher odds of winning
because all you need is a face card in one of 'em
to get the highest possible which is 21.
The other one is when you have an ace you can double down
if it's a favorable hand against the dealer.
So, you always split that and eight it's the same thing.
When you split two eights you have a higher chance,
again mathematically, to come up with a more favorable hand.
However, the one caveat I would say is that
if the casino offers surrender,
surrender is a little known rule.
Surrender is the concept that if I bet $100
and I say surrender, I only have to give the dealer $50.
I take half of my money back.
So, if I have two eights and the rule surrender exists
in that casino, you would say surrender
and you've got the other half back.
If the dealer has a face card, an ace, or a nine,
all other situation you would split the eights.
LiftEmotion, "Can machine learning guess your poker face?"
So, the way the machine will be able to pick out
are these tells.
You know, maybe twitches, or how long you gaze at your cards
and so forth, all these little nuances that frankly,
skilled poker player rely on to beat other poker players.
But at the end of the day, I can totally see
if you focus machine learning and image recognition
on facial expression on individuals,
over time I can totally see how you can have a algorithm
that's tuned on individual players.
IrishNorsewoman, "How do you lose money owning casino?"
If you think about the odds of winning for casino,
it's still very tiny.
You know, casino may beat a regular player 3% of the time.
At the same time, the other side of the ledger is
they're spending tons of money entertaining guests,
you know, restaurants, lights, utilities.
Even though casino gains by purely just the casino
part of the business itself could be making tons of money,
if you don't manage the other part of the business
you could still lose money.
That's all the questions.
Hope you learned something from this
and good luck in your next adventure in casinos.
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