How to Beat Casinos

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How to Beat Casinos


(A Very General Overview)

Review by: C. M0use

“The house always wins.” “The casino eventually gets it all back.” “Ya can’t beat Vegas.”


The conventional folk wisdom view of the casino, perpetuated by a million elements of pop culture (from Ocean’s Eleven to Vegas Vacation), is that it’s an unbeatable machine that has you by the balls with a vice grip once you walk in its doors. It’s all-knowing, all-seeing and every game is rigged. The only way to “win” is to get that one big lucky hit and have enough discipline to walk out the door. Or resign yourself to blowing your budget, but at least get drunk and have a fun time doing it.


Every game the casino runs is designed to give it a long-term advantage, which means the longer you play the more it takes from you. And it’s watching everything you do, staffed by the sharpest minds and eyes in the business; stumble across some little loophole, some winning technique, and they’ll see it and shut it down.


Casinos can’t be beaten, right?

Casinos can be beaten, and people do it all the time. The thing about it is that “beating” them might not look like what you’re imagining, and it might not be worth the cost unless you’re a true degenerate.

“BE MORE SPECIFIC! I WANT MONEY!!!”


OK, here’s the most important thing to know right up front. “Beating” the casino doesn’t mean that there’s a secret technique you can walk in with, take a bunch of cash and walk back out with. At least not in a repeatable and consistent way. Opportunities like that DO pop up from time to time, but they’re fleeting and hard to find. There are a couple of card games that can be fairly consistent money-makers for you … IF you can get to close-to-savant level in terms of playing ability, so that doesn’t help like 90-95% of people.


When you think about beating a casino, it’s better to conceptualize it in terms of value. You beat the casino by extracting more overall value than you put in. To simplify, that usually means the value of all the free stuff the casino gives you exceeds what you spend in getting it. If you can get cash winnings on top of that, all the better, but beating the casino isn’t always about winning cash at games.


EIGHT WAYS TO BEAT CASINOS


Casinos aren’t exactly the all-seeing, all-calculating juggernauts depicted in the Ocean’s series and, er … Casino. They do tend to be quite sharp. But, they’re big corporate entities made up of lots of moving parts, those parts are handled by people, and those people make mistakes and bad decisions sometimes. Vulnerabilities can open up anywhere from the design department at a game manufacturer to the casino marketing team that develops promotions and player comp algorithms.


This isn’t a comprehensive list, but you can sweep just about all of the ways to beat casinos into one of these eight general categories:

  • Finding an exploit in an electronic game
  • Finding a weakness in the rules or dealers of a table game, or in the promotional structure of any type of game, that gives you an expected advantage over an extended period of play
  • Card-counting at blackjack in order to negate the house’s advantage
  • Being really good at poker and beating people who aren’t
  • Being pretty good at poker and grinding to relatively breaking even, coming out ahead with bonuses and comps along the way
  • Being really good at one of the new breed of skill-based games and beating people who aren’t
  • Leveraging non-gaming spend to get benefits you wouldn’t otherwise without lots of play
  • Using teams to bend (or break) table game rules

You could write a book about each of these methods (and people have); detailed explorations are too much for this introductory article, but here’s a little about each just to help expand on them conceptually.

EXPLOITS IN ELECTRONIC GAMES

I’m using the term “exploit” extremely broadly here, to sweep up some things that are more like intentional but opaque features. For example, there are some slots out there that are “guaranteed to pay out” when the progressive jackpot hits a certain amount. I don’t consider that an exploit since the terms are communicated to the player.
Those “guaranteed by X” payout jackpots aren’t seen much anymore, though, because they encourage some things the casino doesn’t care for – a) no one touching the machine until the jackpot is close to popping and b) camping and fighting by degenerates when a scheduled jackpot is about to hit.


An “opaque by design” term would be if there is a hidden “pay by” value, which does happen sometimes (expressed more by the odds of the progressive hitting going up dramatically after a certain point rather than hitting at a fixed amount). Only the slot designers / internal company people know about this, but it can leak out sometimes (or just be figured out by enterprising gamblers). Another example is when accumulated play feeds some sort of bonus game, making it more lucrative until some sort of big win is hit. Sometimes this isn’t explained to the player, causing the less informed ones to walk away at inopportune times (and more informed degenerates to swoop on their seat).


There’s that, and sometimes there are just plain exploits / design flaws in all types of electronic games. One example of that would be weak slot algorithms that are not truly “random.” If you can scan enough spins, you can predict with great accuracy when things like big wins and bonus games will hit. People have even found ways to glitch out video poker and video blackjack machines.


The thing about all of this is that it isn’t going to be publicized (unless a total dope happens to stumble across it), because as soon as news gets to the casinos the machines in question will be yoinked off the gaming floor. These things are either found by criminal rings that test games in private, or degenerates that happen to stumble into an exploit and will either keep it to themselves or only share it with a small circle of fellow degenerates.


You can’t just Google for “slot machine exploits” and then head down to the casino to collect money, but this is a thing that exists.


WEAK DEALERS / WEAK PROMOTIONS


The two prime places that “human error” costs the casino money are in the hands of the dealer at the table, and in the minds of the marketing people that devise promotions.


Inexperienced and sleepy dealers are sometimes taken advantage of. They might not hold their cards right, giving a player at the right table position or an accomplice off the table a look at them. Or they might just make mistakes in paying out or calling results because they’re tired or flustered. There’s a bit of a cottage industry of degenerates who hang out in casinos on the graveyard shift looking for exhausted dealers who might be exploitable.


Casinos tend to be very careful about giving up too much in promotions, but sometimes they let one slip out that can be taken advantage of by a sharp player; usually involving a game with a thin house edge if you play perfectly like blackjack or video poker. Sometimes they have to learn the hard way, as the online casinos did in the first few years that they were available. They used to offer “new player bonuses” with few to no strings attached, and players would just hop around collecting these and using them to the max.


CARD COUNTING

Let’s bust a couple of myths about card counting, possibly that get a boost from casino money: it doesn’t require you to be an autistic savant, and casinos haven’t defeated it with things like automatic shufflers. Pretty much anyone who can focus in a busy environment and doesn’t get flustered in social situations is capable of doing it with enough practice, and the deck shufflers just make it more challenging rather than impossible.


Casinos instead deter card counting by watching betting patterns of players over a long period of time, specifically looking for them to bet when it wouldn’t make sense for a regular player to do so. That just adds a little more complexity to the game for the card counter, as they move between casinos and throw “chaff” into their games by intentionally not making the smartest possible play here and there. Suspected card counters get 86’d and blacklisted, something that casinos are pretty much free to do anytime they feel like it.


It’s tough and it’s a grind, but it’s still doable.


POKER STUDS


This one is kinda self-evident, but for the sake of completeness; a skilled poker player (both at knowing the best play in any given situation and in reading other players) will consistently win over the long term when playing inferior players, that’s not TV or Hollywood bullshit. It’s why there can be things like professional poker leagues that have regular top performers rather than a constantly rotating cast of lucky randos.


POKER GRINDERS

Some players are good enough at poker to beat the average Joe regularly, but not enough to hang with the World Poker Tour. Others are good at the numbers end of the game and clean up at online tables, but fall apart at a real table when asked to interact with actual people. If they embrace the degenerate lifestyle, these people can become poker grinders. They won’t be rolling in the cash, but they can make enough to sustain a modest living.


A grinder is basically playing a shit ton of poker, day in and day out, with the goal of roughly breaking even or being slightly ahead rather than raking in big wins. Most of the profit for them comes in stuff the casino provides for serving as a body at the table: mostly comps at a live casino, and “rakeback bonuses” at online games.


SKILL-BASED GAMES


This one is going to be a little vague because it’s an emerging market, one that only really started a few years ago (and got disrupted in brick-and-mortar locations by the pandemic). But there is a new trend of electronic games that basically function on the table poker model; players play each other, skill can be a factor, and the casino takes a “rake” from the winner as their end for hosting rather than getting involved with the game. So, as with poker, if you’re individually good enough at it there exists the possibility of consistently beating other people.


Some early examples of these multiplayer competitive games can be found here. Another example is the loose genre of “fish hunter” that are popular in Asia and occasionaly pop up in the illicit back rooms of bodegas here in the US.


There isn’t much going on in this space yet, but it’s projected to be a major growth market in the coming years and is probably worth keeping on top of.


NON-GAMING SPEND


Since about 2017 or so, some brick-and-mortar casinos have been evolving their comps/offers system to try to account for people who visit and drop money but don’t gamble much (or at all).


It’s a natural development if you consider how Vegas works now; gambling on the Strip has been in decline for some time, and it’s no longer a feature attraction. Most of their money is now made off of convention visitors, destination restaurants, shows, “day clubs”, hosting major concerts / EDM festivals and families doing holiday weekend getaways looking for more wholesome kid-friendly stuff. Vegas makes more off the average day club party kid who wants to lounge in a rooftop pool getting expensive “bottle service” and renting insanely priced cabanas than they do off the average gambler, by far.


Those algorithms are not as easy to refine as one might think. I don’t want to blow up my own spot and name names, because I’ve personally made good use of one the past few years and it’s STILL paying dividends. But if you dig around and experiment in casino programs that give you credits / tier status for non-gaming spend, you may well find you’re extracting more value than you’re putting in before long.


TEAM PLAY


Like card counting, this is another thing that continues to be available but that casinos watch out for and will merk you if they suspect you of doing it.


For a primer on the possibilities here check out the MIT Blackjack Team.