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Betting Styles

Written July 8, 2008 by Jack Jones

When you take your money to the casino, you have lots of different options on how to bet. Some are obvious like which game you sit in on, others are more subtle like which color to lay down on at the roulette table. All of the choices that you make can customize the characteristics of each session that you have, maximizing your enjoyment on each visit.

Before you decide which game to play and which bets to make there are a few things you should consider. The first is how much you’re comfortable risking on any bet, the profit level at which you’ll be happy to quit, and the amount of time you consider adequate for what you’ll spend if you deplete your bankroll. You may need to make compromises because some of these factors are incompatible with or work against others.

Let’s just start with a simple game like roulette with similar reasoning applying to any other games. A $100 buy-in might get you a long session with $5 per spin on an “outside” 1-to-1 proposition such as Odd or Even; but you’re unlikely to score a big jackpot this way. In contrast, $10 or more on a single number can yield a hefty payday, but it’s also more likely that you will lose that $100 stake rather quickly.

Changing the amount you bet without switching propositions may also have a major impact. Assume your primary criterion is to stay in the game for three hours. You decide to bet strictly on Red, at a table that returns half your wager if a spin yields 0 or 00. The chance your $100 stake will suffice for three hours is 89.5 percent. You try this for a few outings but find you’re not content with the profit even when Red hits regularly. Small wonder, since the chance you’ll double your money within three hours is only about 3.5 percent. On your next trip, you bet $10 on Red, keeping your bankroll at $100. The chance you’ll double your money leaps up to 26.1 percent. But the likelihood you’ll still be in the fray after three hours falls to 54.7 percent.

Incidentally, when outside propositions lose altogether on 0 or 00, $5 bets give players 82.8 percent chance of surviving for three hours on $100 bankrolls, with 2.1 percent shots at doubling their dough. Betting $10, prospects of lasting three hours drop to 43 percent while those of winning $100 rise to 19.6 percent.

Other bets show similar tendencies. Make believe you want to aim for bigger bucks and bet $1 on each of 10 numbers. The chance you’ll double your money within three hours isn’t bad — 55.3 percent. However, you’ve only 32.0 percent chance of enduring for the three hours. Cut the bet to $1 on each of five numbers. Now there’s 46.5 percent chance you’ll survive for three hours, but the likelihood you’ll see $100 profit is cut to 37.5 percent.

Maybe you’re not interested in playing time but more in just hitting a big pay day. If you’re not afraid to see it all go at once, you could toss your whole $100 on one spot. The chance you’ll be in the clover with $3,500 is one out of 38. That’s about 2.6 percent.

Perhaps you like longshots but aren’t prepared to go for broke. You could put $10 on one or another single spot for each of 10 spins. The chance all 10 will miss, taking your $100 in about a quarter of an hour, is 76.6 percent. Alternately, the chance you’ll hit at least once is the complementary 23.4 percent.

The likelihood you’ll have exactly one win and net $260 is a respectable 20.7 percent; that of two wins, a $620 profit, is 2.5 percent. From there, you’ve got hopes but they’re dim — 0.18 percent for $980, 0.008 percent for $1,340, and so on. You could even finish the series of 10 $10 bets with $3,500 by winning every one. The chance of this is under one in six quadrillion so you may not want to rely too heavily on being lucky that day.