How do the odds work?

[Foz72]

Hiya all,

Im new to this site and ive only really just started playing online casinos in the last month or so.

I know generally theres a ruld of thumb whereby the odds are slightly in the house's favour.

But what i want to know is how does it work?

for example, if i played for 10 mins a day rather that 1 hour a day, would my chances be less of losing? or is it a case of the results are remembered over time and at some point you will lose whatever you made during the time youve played.

so if i played for 10mins a for 10 days day and won £10 a day would i have the same chances as if i played for 100 mins in one day?

Does that make sense? I hope so lol!

Also one more question, is the outcome of a roulette table based on how many times ive won previously? eg If i bet on red lets say, would the 'program' look to see how many times ive previously won and then so make sure a black was rolled? Or is it really 'random'?

The reason im asking is that sometimes the roulette tables just dont seem to be 'random' enough, so one time you'll have 9 runs on one colour? etc.

Phew a lot of questions for somone new! hahah.

Thanks for your help guys.

Foz72.

[lojo]

Welcome Foz

A good casino will use a state of the art Random Number Generator (RNG) it is absolutely, with all the supercomputers on earth chained together, unpredictable.

The House Edge on a roulette table are simply the green spaces (american roulette has 2 zeros, european has one zero.)
As there are 36 numbers 1-36 and one zero (equals 37) if you place a bet on one number your odds are 37:1 and the game will pay 36 times (36x) your bet.
So if you take 36/37 you see .9729729 subtract this from 1 and you have the house edge (HE) of .027027 or a house advantage of almost 3%.

Theoretically if you took 1,000,000,000 dollars and played one number (any number) for one dollar each spin, for a billion spins you would end up with $972,972,972 this means you've gotten your expected payout percentage of 97.29% and the house has gotten its 2.702%
As you can well imagine, if you take your $972,972,972 and spin it away at one dollar each spin until it's cycled through, you will have another loss equal to the HE (give or take a very slight variation)

Any time during those 1,000,000,000 spins you may very well see 9 blacks in a row or 13 reds or even the number 17 come up three or more times in a row.

Now take your red or black (odd/even) bet there are 18 reds and 18 blacks and one green... 18 chances to win and 19 chances to lose.
18/19=.94736 you can do the math from there. You'll get back about 95c for every dollar you bet in the long run. (it takes way more than 100 bets to meet the average.

And there's the good news (or not) you can bet and if you are lucky you will come out ahead at some point (or you may not) and if you simply quit when you are ahead you have a better chance in the long run

There's no way to answer you question about 'how often betting', except to say that unless you quit when you are ahead you will eventually lose, and the less you play the less you will probably lose. On a game like roulette you are going to get more or less the same results whether you spin once per day for a 10 years or 36,510 times in one day.


Hoped that helped All of the casinos listed here http://www.casinomeister.com/casinos.php will give you a true RNG (as far as anybody knows) They are your best bet for several reasons.

Best of luck to you

[happygobrokey]

the games should be independant, that is, they don't take into account previous games or trials. that is why red can come up 9 times or more in a row. although the sequence "RRRRRRRRR" is very unlikely to happen, each time the wheel spins, it is still 50/50 to come up red. only the rogues of the highest order would take measures against previous wins that are a normal part of variance.

variance is the idea that your actual results will vary from the expected return. slots return about 95%, so with no variance you would put in a dollar and get 95 cents back every time. variance happens because sometimes you win more, other times you lose more. but if you played forever (with an infinite bankroll), you will end up overall with 95% of all the money you put into the machine. in statistics, we say the bigger the sample size, the closer to the true mean you get, and with less variance.

for instance, if you make one spin for $1 and make $50, your return is 5000%. if you make the same spin and win nothing, your return is 0%. these are extreme cases, and the more spins/hands you play, the closer you will get to what the game truly pays. playing for longer only brings you closer to the theoretical return, it doesn't mean you will do "better or worse". this goes back to independance, your odds are the same every time you make the bet.

the only thing playing for less time will do is keep you from putting too much money on the table. obviously you stand to lose less actual money if you're only putting $50 in play rather than $500, but you won't necessarily lose any less often.

the rules are formulated to be in the house's favour, so that their "cut" is built right into the game. it does not need to bother looking at past results, because over the long run, the players get less than $1 back for every $1 they play anyway. runs of good and bad luck are going to happen, that's variance, and that's the reason we make bets, risking money to try to get lucky in the short term.

that's why casinos make you wager so much (usually on less favourable games, ie those that return less to the player each time on average) when they give you a bonus, because the game is structured for you to slowly lose it back if you play long enough. even if you get lucky streaks along the way, the built-in house edge makes them the winners in the end.

gambling in a casino is always a losing proposition, every bet is designed to give you back less than you wager, and if you played forever, you are guaranteed to go broke. so the key to making a profit is to play only in the short term (how short is up to you, even a year can be a short term) and exit while you are winning. variance is your friend and your enemy. variance determines a win or loss in a session. your aim is to cash out while on the positive side of variance.

visit wizardofodds.com for more info on variance and the house edge of specific games. getting familiar with these concepts is what will make you more likely to be a winning player. play smart to give yourself the best chances. i hope this answers some of your questions and puts you on the path to understanding the essence of gambling.

[Foz72]

Wow that certainly is a very good description, thanks for taking the time to write that out, i appreciate it!

Well i do tend to play only for short burts and quite when im winning, even if its just a few pound, although the problem is with that is i have to play a good number of times to gain a little each time to cover for when i lose!

But i am new to all this and so im learning every day, thanks again for your help!

Foz.

[Foz72]

Another great reply, thanks happy!

My concerns were that all the previous results were remembered and so future results were based on previous ones. For example if you won 3 times in a row then youre going to be due for a loss pretty soon!

Thats why i tend to play for just short periods, and usually only a pound at a time! but still usually make about £10-£20 loss so thats what brought me here to try to find some answers to these questions.

Thanks again guys for taking the time to explain!

Foz.

[Casinomeister]

Wow that certainly is a very good description, thanks for taking the time to write that out, i appreciate it!

Well i do tend to play only for short burts and quite when im winning, even if its just a few pound, although the problem is with that is i have to play a good number of times to gain a little each time to cover for when i lose!

But i am new to all this and so im learning every day, thanks again for your help!

Foz.

Hi Foz,

Welcome to the forum!

Since you seem to be starting out, here are some references you should read up on:

http://wizardofodds.com/
http://www.casinomeister.com/casino-research/
http://www.casinomeister.com/casino_pick.php
http://www.casinomeister.com/casinos.php

And don't forget to subscribe to Casinomeister's newsletter...

These will steer you into the right direction.

Cheerio!

[happygobrokey]

something "being due" is known as the gambler's fallacy. it's a flawed idea because each trial/spin/hand is independant.

while it is true that "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" is probably more than a million to one shot, on the next spin the chance of getting R is still 50/50. you are only betting on the current spin, and in all the zillions of spins that have been spun and are yet to be spun, streaks as long as "RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR" will occur.

if i bet you i could flip a coin 10 times and have ten "heads" in a row, i will lose that bet with virtual certainty. but if i bet that 10 heads in a row will come somewhere in a million flips, there's a decent chance for that to happen. if i happen to flip nine heads in a row AND THEN bet you i can flip a tenth head, it's 50/50 that i'll win.

these are all different issues, and to say a result is due to come up on any single trial because of past independant trials is a fallacy. things can never be due, because each time it's always random. don't let it discourage you, though, just know that each game is a fresh start and nothing to do with past games.

[Avatar73]

Just a quick one! 17 reds in a row is not random, is it !? Ah, but it depends how many spins you look over. Play long enough, experience enough spins, and eventually a truly random game will throw u p17+ of the same colour in a row.

And about your 10/100 mins thing.... Yes, in a sense you could compress all the playing you do over your life into one long run, and theoretically, the outcome would be the same. If you play 10 mins a day, then you would expect after 10 days to be equivalent to one session of 100 mins. In a nutshell!

[mrsddc]

Welcome Foz



As there are 36 numbers 1-36 and one zero (equals 37) if you place a bet on one number your odds are 37:1 and the game will pay 36 times (36x) your bet.
So if you take 36/37 you see .9729729 subtract this from 1 and you have the house edge (HE) of .027027 or a house advantage of almost 3%.

Theoretically if you took 1,000,000,000 dollars and played one number (any number) for one dollar each spin, for a billion spins you would end up with $972,972,972 this means you've gotten your expected payout percentage of 97.29% and the house has gotten its 2.702%
As you can well imagine, if you take your $972,972,972 and spin it away at one dollar each spin until it's cycled through, you will have another loss equal to the HE (give or take a very slight variation)

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