Your interest in gambling is understandable. It’s fun to take a chance on random chance and could even be profitable.
Who would turn down the opportunity to take $100 and turn it into $1000 in just a few hours?
That sounds almost too good to be true; if you were to start an online business, even through an online auction site where you can sell items almost instantaneously, you’re unlikely to turn a 900% profit in just one day. The probability of that happening is infinitesimal.
But gambling offers exactly that kind of opportunity, and though most people won’t be able to “roll it up” 9 times over, the truth is that a few people manage to do it every day. That’s why we’re so curious about how to gamble and win.
Remember the old Latin adage, caveat emptor, though. That means “let the buyer beware”.
It’s your responsibility to avoid being misled.
You can find lots of silly gambling advice and tips articles on the internet. Websites, competing for your attention, will publish just about anything to please the search engines with new content.
But there comes a point where most writers simply run out of good ideas and they start listing things they have already written about or make up nonsense. It’s nothing to a freelance writer to go browse random websites and steal their ideas. Even the most experienced gambling writers browse the web for inspiration.
That’s how myths spread and become popular.
Take everything you read (including this post) with a grain of salt.
Before I get to the actual gambling myths, let’s talk a little bit about what a myth is. The word myth means a story that is told to explain some phenomenon. That’s vague, but we share myths constantly. In fact, even science uses myths to explain how the universe works.
But scientists avoid using the word “myth” because it’s become associated with false or misleading stories. A myth can be true, but when we use the word today, we almost always mean that the story is probably false.
And that’s how I am using the word in the title of this article, “5 Myths That Gambling Sites Tell You”. I mean that the myths you’ll find below aren’t true. Maybe some of them were true once, but times change–and so has the world of gambling. A good gambling website will update its information as the facts on the ground change.
But some older sites haven’t been updated in years. They may be telling you things that were once held to be true but which are no longer correct.
I hope you’ll find this list of popular gambling myths to be illuminating.
1. Casinos Put Their “Loose” Slot Machines in High Visibility Areas
This is one of the most widely debated of all gambling myths. The story is traced back to a book about how to win at gambling that was published in the 1990s. The author interviewed casino floor managers and they told him that in order to draw players in to the slot areas they placed their loosest machines at the ends of the rows of machines where more people would see players winning. Today many floor managers, when asked about this practice, laugh and flat out deny it.
So what’s the truth?
Historically speaking, slot machines weren’t as popular with men who visited casinos in the 1980s and 1990s. The slot gaming industry had a reputation for offering boring games, and for some reason a lot of women gravitated toward the slot machines while their husbands favored the table games. All that began to change with the advent of video slot machines, which first appeared in the 1970s but only really took off in the mid- to late 1990s.
Also, Las Vegas casinos had a habit of grouping their slot machines in long, narrow rows. It was easy to get lost in the sea of machines in those days, even though the casinos had fewer slot machines on the floor. The psychology of placing the loosest machines on the ends of the rows and in high visibility areas was similar to how supermarkets place their sales at the end of aisles even today.
And the older slot machines were easier to reconfigure. Many of them had a mechanical control panel where you could choose from 1 to 6 settings determining payback percentages. The newer games require that the chips be replaced, which requires a lot more effort.
Although this story might have been true for some casinos at one time, casino floor managers today all agree there is no need for this kind of deceptive marketing. The slot machine games pay much better now than they used to thanks to competition. Also, the machines are broken up into smaller groups so it’s easier to move around them. There are now many “high visibility” areas and even if it could help to place loose machines in some locations, it would be hard to identify the best locations.
A floor manager just doesn’t need to invest time and resources in this kind of marketing.
2. You’ll Win More Often from Games with a “Low House Edge”
This is almost considered an axiom among gambling experts.
There’s some truth to the idea. After all, the games with the lowest house edge are the games from which the casino profits least.
So of course those games pay more to the players in the long run.
But in the short run, game outcomes are determined by random chance. There’s no way that you can look at the house edge and know in advance if you’re going to win or lose when you play a certain game.
What is the “house edge” anyway?
It’s the estimated percentage of all the wagers made on a game (over the expected lifetime of the game) that the casino (the house) will keep. The house edge could be anywhere from 75% to 1%. Gamblers like to use the house edge as a metric for evaluating the best or safest games to play.
But this can be a dangerous practice; it can lull you into a false confidence.
Take roulette, for example, which offers a relatively small house edge of 2.70% for European (single zero) roulette. Most gambling websites tell you this is a better house edge than you can expect from the vast majority of slot machine games.
But what if you have $1000, place all of that on black, and the ball lands on a red number on the wheel?
Do you get to keep $970?
No, you lose the whole $1000.
The house edge has no effect on the short term outcome of any gambling game. It assumes you make modest wagers and have an endless supply of money. The endless supply of money comes from many different people playing the same game over and over again. Sometimes the casino pays a large prize to a player. Most of the time players make small wagers, and they win and lose in an endless back-and-forth variation of outcomes.
Although you can use the house edge to compare the likely outcomes of playing individual games all night long, it’s only one of several metrics that tell you anything useful about gambling. For example, if you don’t know how to play blackjack you will almost certainly lose more than 1-2% of your money just because of your inexperience and your lack of knowledge about the game rules.
Don’t choose which games you will play solely on the basis of the house edge. It guarantees you nothing. Play the games you want to play but manage your money and your time carefully.
3. Ask for Comps
Comps are complimentary services provided by the casino, such as free meals and free hotel rooms. A lot of online gambling guides advise you to ask for comps in order to offset your losses and to take advantage of comps when you win.
But here’s the thing about comps:
Most of the available comps are small, and you don’t have to ask for them at all. Furthermore, comps cost the casinos money, and they don’t bear that cost out of the generosity of their hearts. You pay for those comps.
The most popular casinos don’t lack for people willing to lose money on their games. The chances that a casino will comp you a room for the night aren’t great. They can usually rent out those rooms in advance. You might be comped a room if you really do lose thousands of dollars. They might also comp your room if there’s an accident where the casino wants to engender your good will.
But most people who lose thousands of dollars will just lose thousands of dollars.
Most of the real comps you can expect to receive are provided through member loyalty programs. If you don’t sign up for the program before you start playing the games, even the table games, you’ll never receive most of the comps available to you.
The loyalty programs give you a card you insert into the machines or hand to the dealers at the tables. The casino tracks how much you gamble and win or lose. You earn points for every wager you make.
Those points accumulate toward discounts on many casino services, including room rates, meals, tickets for shows, and even cash back bonuses.
The comps you earn through loyalty programs vary by casino, but you don’t need to ask for them. If you do start asking about comps don’t be surprised if the casino staff point you to the member loyalty program desk.
That’s where you get your card.
4. Penny Slot Machines Pay the Worst Percentages of Slot Games
This myth is based on 2 facts:
- Some penny slot machine games have low theoretical returns to players. A theoretical return to player is the other side of the house edge. If the house edge is 20% then the theoretical return to player is 80%. When penny slots were first introduced to casinos, they operated by different rules from the traditional mechanical slots.
- Older penny slot machines operated on the basis of a lot of pay lines. You could turn these pay lines off one by one. What gamblers didn’t realize, however, is that deactivating the pay lines on a penny slot machine really did lower the theoretical return to player. That’s because the games were designed to pay the most prizes in a random order across all pay lines. Deactivating pay lines prevents you from winning a lot of prizes. So the penny slot machines quickly earned a reputation for paying poorly–in part because players did not understand how the games worked.
Fortunately modern slot games with multiple pay lines don’t allow you to deactivate pay lines any more. Game designers and casinos learned from the marketplace as players began avoiding the games that took their money the most. Because the games were electronically monitored, the industry was able to detect the patterns of disparity in losses and correct for these disparities, at first by improving their help screens to explain the way the pay lines and second by removing the ability to deactivate pay lines.
If you play an older slot game that allows you to disable pay lines, just don’t do that.
5. You Cannot Win at Keno
Everyone tells you to never play keno because the house edge is incredibly high. That’s not entirely accurate. Keno is a lottery style game where you pick 2 to 10 or 1 to 15 numbers from a pool of 80 numbers. When the game is played, 20 numbers are drawn. Players are awarded prizes based on how many of their picked numbers are drawn. The odds in keno vary by casino and by the picks. A Pick is the number of numbers you choose. In other words, a Pick 6 means you gamble on 6 numbers that you choose. Your prize is determined by how many of your six numbers are drawn.
The casino or keno operator decides how much to pay for each prize. These prize amounts vary from venue to venue and so the payback percentage or theoretical return to player varies from venue to venue. Nonetheless, the best RTP tends to occur for Pick 4, Pick 5, and Pick 6 tickets. You may see a return as high as 75% on some of these options.
The house edge is usually described as 25% or higher (ranging up to 94% or higher on the Pick 10 or higher options). While keno’s house edge is much higher than on other games, players can still expect to win some prizes on modest bets. On a Pick 5 ticket you can win prizes if 3, 4, or 5 of your numbers are drawn.
People would never play keno if there were no winners. When gambling writers talk down keno they almost always hammer on the worst possible scenario, where the player is always playing Pick 10. Although there may be some hopeful players who really do choose 10 numbers, they’re still looking at a theoretical return to player in the neighborhood of 68% to 71%.
By comparison, if you only play single numbers in roulette, your theoretical return to player is well below 10%. While keno does not offer what would be called a fair distribution between player and house, the players still keep most of the money as in other casino games.
Conclusion
It’s your responsibility to separate fact from fiction when you’re reading about gambling on the internet. Even the common “gambling myths” articles on many websites are rife with errors.
I’ve intentionally included some errors in the above post. Let me know in the comments if you can spot them.