Speaking about casinos overall, they make money from the games considering the following factors: Handle. A handle is the total amount of money that players bet in this or that game. To get an income, casinos need to find a way to boost their house edge and make players spend more time playing games. The more they bet, the more money casinos. The most common method by which a casino makes money from players in a poker room is the pot rake – a scaled commission fee generally taken from the pot of each poker hand. A pot rake is generally between 2.5 and 10% of the pot, up to a predetermined maximum amount. There are other non-percentage methods used by a casino to take the rake. Online, you can visit any number of different venues within a few seconds of one another. It’s, therefore, important that online casinos spend money standing out from the crowd. They do this in a few ways. One is conventional or online advertising – TV or newspaper ads, and popups, etc.
The casino industry has always been big business. The decadent resorts of Las Vegas alone are testament to this. Even the fact that there is a city in the middle of the Nevada desert is a dead giveaway to the long-term profitability of operating a casino.
Each year the biggest gambling companies take literally billions in revenue. Their profits are technically winnings, since each bet they receive has a chance to take money from them. However, casino operators aren’t usually worried about going broke to a lengthy period of bad luck. When taken at the hand-by-hand level, the phrase “the house always wins” isn’t exactly true. However, when you consider a casino’s profits over the course of a year, a month, or even a week, it’s clear that it’s not the players who are consistently winning.
If land-based casinos are profitable, online casinos are literal goldmines. Whereas the former requires staffing, premises, equipment, and other overheads, many of these facets of operating a gambling venue are taken care of by software in the online casino. This means even greater profits.
You see, almost every game in the casino, whether online or real-world, has what’s known as a house edge. This essentially means that the probability of the player winning is always lower than the probability of the house winning.
Many people wrongly assume that they have just as much chance of winning as they do of losing at a casino. If this was the case, the industry wouldn’t be worth anything like what it is today. In reality, each game has been carefully designed to give the casino (the house) a higher likelihood of winning over the long term.
The easiest way to explain this is with a game of European roulette. In European roulette there are 37 numbers (0-36). This means the probability of the ball landing on any one specific number is 36 to one. In other words, if you bet on a single number 37 times, your number is expected to come up once.
If you were to use £1 bets in the above example, the casino would pay you out at 35 to one when you won. You would take your £1 back and receive £35 as winnings. Over the course of the 37 spins, you would have bet £37 and taken £36 back from the casino. The extra £1 is the casino’s profit.
Let’s consider a second example. Say you bet on only either black or red. The casino would pay you at one to one for a winner (you take back your stake and receive the same amount in winnings too). If there were no house edge whatsoever, the probability of you hitting red or black should also be 50 percent. However, it’s not. The fact that there is a green number on the wheel (or two green numbers in American roulette) means that the odds are in fact just under 50%. The “0” and “00” sections of the wheel represent the house’s edge.
Thanks to the house edge, it’s mathematically impossible for the player to profit long-term from casino games. Even if you do beat the casino, the house doesn’t care. For you, the game is against a single opponent – the house. For the casino it’s about every single player than walks through the door. Just like in poker, the player playing with the most favourable odds will occasionally lose but with enough gameplay (casinos get a lot of gameplay), their edge will emerge.
Although the above example details roulette, each game at both online and land-based casinos will have a house edge. One exception is poker, where players play against one another rather than the house. Here, the casino takes a tournament fee or a “rake” off each pot to ensure profitability.
As mentioned, online casino expenses are typically far lower than they would be at a land-based casino. There is no lavish building, complete with decadent furnishings to finance, and games don’t require human dealers. The online casino operator doesn’t need a liquor licence and doesn’t require the same level of physical security as a brick-and-mortar venue either.
That said, online casinos aren’t free to operate. Servers need hosting, licences obtaining, and software deals need financing. All of this is very expensive.
Another huge expense for online casinos that is less relevant to land-based operators is marketing. Most land-based casinos rely on their presence to attract punters. It’s there and so are you. If you like gambling, you might attend the casino. Sure, they do have some marketing budget but the sheer lack of competition in an area means it’s minimal.
Compare this to an online casino. Online, you can visit any number of different venues within a few seconds of one another. It’s, therefore, important that online casinos spend money standing out from the crowd. They do this in a few ways. One is conventional or online advertising – TV or newspaper ads, and popups, etc.
Another is by offering all sorts of bonuses as an incentive for people to play. The casino will reduce the overall cost of offering such promotions using wagering requirements but they still cost money. Occasionally a player will win big from a bonus, yet for the number of new players they attract, it’s a necessary cost for a successful iGaming operation.
It’s very difficult to say exactly how much different online casinos make. For one, most online casinos are not publicly listed. They’re under no obligation to report income and expenditure. Complicating matters further is the fact that many of the largest casinos will also have sportsbooks. Bet365 reports a profit of around $896 million for 2018/19 yet does not detail what percentage of this is from the casino alone.
One thing is for sure though, operating an online casino is a highly profitable line of business. The iGaming industry alone was worth a staggering $40 billion in 2018. Several of the most profitable companies in the industry also either provide games for online casinos or actually operate casino games themselves. Examples include Playtech, 888, Holdings, Paddy Power BetFair, and GVC Holdings PLC.
Of course, not all online casinos will boast the kind of player counts as the likes of Bet365, Ladbrokes, and William Hill. For these smaller venues, it’s even more difficult to tell just how much profits they make. However, thanks to the tried and tested business model of offering games with a real chance to win, but that favour the casino, it’s safe to say that the online casino industry is suitably lucrative for those operating within it.
I have a friend I’m really fond of who believes in all kinds of conspiracy theories. He’s a nice guy, but he thinks the earth is flat.
He’s also convinced that the casino makes all its money from cheating. In fact, he told me once that the only fair game in the casino is craps, because you can’t fake the roll of the dice.
I’m not sure why he thinks dice are immune to being “fixed” while roulette wheels and playing cards aren’t. I understand how any of those devices could be fixed.
But casinos don’t need to fix any of these devices to make a profit.
They have a really simple means of making a profit and keeping their games completely random.
They examine the odds of winning for a game, then when they set their payout odds, they set them lower than the odds of winning.
One of the ways of looking at the probability of something happening is by looking at the odds that it will or won’t happen.
Probability is just a ratio that compares the number of ways a specific event can happen with the number of ways it can’t happen.
Here’s an easy example:You flip a coin. What’s the probability that you’ll get heads as a result?
It’s 1/2, 50%, or 1 to 1.
That’s the probability expressed as a fraction, as a percentage, and as odds.
1 to 1 means there’s one way to lose and one way to win.
When you roll a 6-sided die, what’s the probability of rolling a 6?
There’s one way to roll a 6, and there are 5 ways to roll something that’s not a 6.
So the odds are 5 to 1.
But there’s more to odds than that.
Odds also is a way of describing how much your bet pays off.
If you received 1 to 1 odds on guessing a coin toss, that would be called even money. You could bet $100, and if you won, you’d win $100. If you lose, you’d lose $100.
If you received 5 to 1 odds on guessing the outcome of a die roll, you’d break even over the long run. You’d win $500 every time you won, but you’d lose $100 on the 5 out of 6 times that you lost.
The way the casino makes its profit is by paying you winnings that are lower than the odds that would make a game break-even.
For example, if the casino made you risk $110 to win $100 on a coin toss, in the long run, the casino would make a profit.
50% of the time, they’d lose $100. The other 50% of the time, they’d win $110. It’s easy to see how they could make a profit doing that, right?
Or, if the casino paid off at 4 to 1 on guessing the correct outcome on a roll of a single die, they’d be making a clear profit, too, right?
5 out of 6 times, you’d lose $100. Only once out of 6 times would you win $400, which means the casino would come out ahead in the long run.
If this is how the bets are set up, and if most people know it, why do people still gamble on casino games?
There are 2 reasons:
The first is that people are woefully uneducated about basic math in this country. Fewer casino customers than you think understand how the math behind these games works.
The second is that when you’re dealing with random events, in the short run, anything can happen, no matter how unlikely.
If you guess that a 6 will come up on the next roll of a 6-sided die, you’re PROBABLY going to lose.
But sometimes you’ll win.
In math, there’s something called the Law of Large Numbers.
This is the premise that if you repeat something random often enough, eventually, your actual results will resemble the statistically predicted results.
If you roll a 6-sided die 6 times, you might get the same number 3 or 4 times.
But if you roll a 6-sided die 6000 times, you’ll usually see a pretty even distribution for which number comes up.
This short term variation is what gamblers call luck.
That’s how some gamblers walk away from the casino winners even though the odds are against them.
Blackjack seems like a game where the casino couldn’t have an edge. In fact, it seems like a game where a smart player might get an edge over the house just by knowing how to play his cards.
After all, the odds of getting various cards are the same for both the player and the dealer.
AND the player gets a 3 to 2 payout anytime he gets a 2-card total of 21.
It’s simpler than you think, actually. The house edge in blackjack comes from the fact that the player has to play his hand before the dealer plays hers.
If your hand busts, you lose your chips immediately, before the dealer plays her hand. Even if the dealer busts, too, you’ve lost your money.
That, by itself, is enough of an advantage for the casino to make a profit.
Even if you play with perfect basic strategy, you’ll probably bust your hand around 30% of the time.
Even if the casino busts, too, you’ve already lost your bet.
The other advantage the casino has is if the dealer gets a natural, you don’t even get to play your hand. Your only hope is if you also have a natural, which is treated as a push. You don’t win any money, nor do you lose any money in that situation.
Craps is known for being exciting and for having a wide variety of bets you can make.
But every bet at the craps table (save one) pays off at less than the odds of winning. The only bet where that isn’t true is called (appropriately enough) the odds bet, and it pays off at true odds.
But to place that bet, you must have first placed a bet on the pass line or the don’t pass line. (Or the come or don’t come.)
Those are the best bets at the craps table, by the way, but they still give the house an edge of 1.41% or 1.36%. The other bets at the craps table are all far worse, and they all result in a profit for the casino because they don’t pay off at the same odds they have of winning.
Here’s an example of a craps bet, its odds of winning, and the payout odds for that bet:
The “any 7” bet is a single-roll bet that the results of the next roll of the dice will total 7.
The odds of winning that bet are 5 to 1.
The payout is 4 to 1.
I used the same example in the introduction when I talked about the probability of rolling a single die.
Roulette is my favorite example of how probability works, especially as it relates to casino games and the house edge. It’s a simple game, too.
You have a spinning wheel with 38 possible outcomes. The pockets in this wheel are numbered 0, 00, and 1-36. The 0 and the 00 are both green. Half the numbers 1 through 36 are black, and the other half are red.
You have a variety of roulette bets available to you, but all of them share the same house edge. (Well, except for one bet, which I’ll explain here, too.)
The easiest bets, and the ones which win the most often, are the even money bets. These are the bets where if you bet $100 on them, you win $100.
An example of an even-money bet is a bet on red. Since almost half the numbers are red, you have an almost 50% chance of winning this bet.
But the 0 and the 00 make it so that the bet doesn’t pay off at the same odds as the odds of winning.
You have 38 possible results, and 18 of them are red. That’s 18/38, or 47.37%.
If you had a statistically perfect set of 38 spins, you’d win that bet 18 times, but you’d lose 20 times. You’d win $1800 on your winning spins, but you’d lose $2000 on your losing spins. Your net loss would be $200.
If you averaged that by the number of spins you made, you’d have an average loss per spin of $5.26.
All the bets on an American roulette wheel pay off at odds that would be a break-even proposition IF the 0 and the 00 weren’t on the wheel.
The bet that wins the least often in a roulette game is a single-number bet. This is a bet on a specific number, like 18, for example.
You have a 37 to 1 shot of winning this one, but when you do win it, you only get paid off at 35 to 1. The same averages apply—this bet also has a 5.26% edge.
One bet at an American roulette table has a higher house edge than that, though. It’s the 5-number bet, which is a bet that the ball will land on 0, 00, 1, 2, or 3.
That bet has an even higher house edge—7.89%.
The only correct strategy in an American roulette game is to place any bet you want as long as it’s not the 5-number bet. No strategy can overcome the inherent mathematical edge built into the game.of people come up with roulette systems based on changing the size of your bet based on what happened on previous spins of the roulette wheel. None of those systems improve your probability of winning in the long run.
The best explanation I ever read of how the various roulette betting systems work is that it’s like trying to add up negative numbers to get a positive result. No matter how you size those negative numbers, they’re still negative, and you’ll still wind up with a long-term loss.
Slot machines and video poker do the same thing. They just have more possible prize amounts on their pay tables.
But each of those potential payouts has a probability.
The payout for that possibility is always lower than the probability that you’ll hit it.
Let’s use a simple example:You have a slot machine with 10 symbols, and each of those symbols has an equal probability of coming up. Let’s suppose that the top prize on the machine is for lining up 3 cherry symbols. The payout for that is 900 for 1.
What’s the probability of having that outcome?
It’s 1/10 X 1/10 X 1/10, or 1/1000.
If you make 1000 statistically perfect spins, you’ll lose $1000 (betting a dollar per spin). You’ll win $900. That’s a net loss of $100 over 1000 spins, which means that this slot machine has a 90% payback percentage and a 10% house edge.
Video poker games work the same way, although the probabilities are driven by the probabilities inherent in poker hands and decks of cards. The probability of getting a flush playing Jacks or Better video poker is the same as it would be if you were dealing out of a deck of 52 cards.
I should point out one big difference between gambling machines (like slots and video poker) and table games.
The payouts for table games are made on an X to Y basis. For example, a payout on a single-number roulette bet is 35 to 1.
This means that if you lose, you lose $1.
If you win, you keep your bet, and you win $35 on top of it.
But with a gambling machine, the payouts are made on an X for Y basis.
This means that if you lose, you lose the amount you bet.
But if you win, you get the winnings, but you don’t get your original bet back on top of it. You traded your wager FOR the winnings.
This implication is important, because you’ll find many games that offer an even-money payout on a specific hand or combination of reel symbols.
On a gambling machine, this is just a push. You haven’t really won anything. You just got the size of your bet back. If you were playing blackjack, this would be considered a push.
Why do casinos profit from random casino games?
It’s simple.
They offer payout odds that are lower than the odds of winning.
In the short run, you can still win in a situation like that, but in the long run, the casino will always win. You can think of this disparity between the payout odds and the odds of winning as the house edge.
And you can think of the house edge as being like a tax on each bet you place. Another way to think of it is as a negative interest rate on an investment.
Playing casino games can be fun, but in the long run, playing casino games is a costly endeavor for a casino gambler.
It’s also a profitable endeavor for the casino.