A lot of times, especially at online casinos, the pay tables for the multi-hand games aren’t as generous as the pay tables for the single hand games. If you’re playing a 9/6 Jacks or Better game at an online casino and decide to move up to multi-hand, double check the pay table before playing.
If someone tries to sell you a book titled “How to Win at Online Casinos Every Time,” turn them down.
I don’t know anyone who WOULDN’T like to win at online casinos every time they play.
There was a time when you could pull off some neat advantage play techniques when taking advantage of online casinos’ signup bonuses, but that time is long past.
In this post, I offer some suggestions about how to win at online casinos. Every time, though?
Not likely.
Understand How Online Casinos Work
Real money online casinos don’t work much differently from traditional brick and mortar casinos. They offer games where your odds of winning and losing don’t quite line up with the odds you’re getting paid on your bets. The difference is called “the house edge,” and that’s the reason casinos win in the long run.
In a traditional brick and mortar casino, the casino uses devices like playing cards, dice, and spinning wheels to generate outcomes for the various games. On their slot machine games and video poker games, they use computer programs called random number generators to determine outcomes. The acronym for “random number generator” is “RNG,” which is what I’ll use for the rest of this post.
In an online casino, the RNG duplicates the same probabilities that you’d see in a traditional casino. You have the same odds of rolling a 7 through a virtual casino program as you do when rolling a pair of dice. An online roulette wheel has the same 38 stops on it that a real roulette wheel would have, and so on.
How To Win Online Casino Games
The house edge for the games is the same.
How the House Edge Works at an Online Casino
The house edge is a mathematical estimate of how much you will lose on average in the long run at a casino based on the discrepancy between the payout odds and the odds of winning.
Here’s an example:
In a game of roulette, you have 38 individual numbers you can bet on. The probability of winning with any of these numbers is 37 to 1 – you have 37 ways to lose and only one way to win.
The payoff for a roulette bet on a single number, though, is 35 to 1.
If you bet on all 38 numbers at the same time, you’d lose 37 bets at one unit each.
You’d win one bet, and you’d get 35 units back on that one.
You’d have a net loss of 2 units, which you’d average out over all 38 bets to get an average.
That average turns out to be 5.26%, which is the house edge for roulette.
It’s important to understand that the house edge in a casino is a long-term phenomenon. In the short run, gamblers can and do win all the time.
If you play long enough, though, the Law of Large Numbers takes hold and ensures that your actual results start to resemble the mathematically expected results.
Advantage Play Techniques in Casinos
Savvy gamblers for decades have come up with various ways to get an edge at these “unbeatable” casino games.
In blackjack, players count cards.
In craps, players use dice setting and controlled shooting to affect the odds.
In roulette, players clock wheels looking for imperfections in their operation.
Then they bet accordingly.
Any of these techniques can work, although some of them are more practical than others. But none of these advantage play techniques work in an online casino because the results are driven by a computer program.
An RNG doesn’t develop a bias like a physical roulette wheel does.
You don’t actually touch or throw the dice in an online craps game.
And the RNG shuffles the blackjack deck after every hand, making card counting impossible.
Bonus Abuse at Online Casinos
Years ago, when I first got involved in the online casino industry, gamblers would use signup bonuses to give themselves a mathematical edge over the casino. Here’s how that worked along with an explanation of why it doesn’t work anymore:
When you sign up at an online casino, they usually offer to match your deposit with some free money in your account. They do this as a percentage of your deposit. The first bonus offer I ever saw was a 200% bonus worth up to $200.
You’d deposit $100 in the casino, and they’d give you $300 to play with.
Of course, you couldn’t cash out immediately. You had to play casino games, but in those days, wagering requirements were really low. They were low enough that someone could almost guarantee a profit from their bonus offer.
What are “wagering requirements?”
That’s what they call the amount you’re required to put into action before you’re allowed to cash out.
Here’s an example:
You deposit $100 and get a $200 bonus. You have $300 in your account now. The casino requires you to wager 15X your deposit plus bonus, which means you need to make $4500 in bets before cashing out.
How People Used to Make a Profit from Online Casino Bonuses
In the old days, you had multiple options for getting your $4500 in wagering requirement hurdle cleared. One way would be to play blackjack at $5 per hand for 900 hands. You could accomplish that in 4 or 5 hours if you played fast.
After that kind of action, how much money would you expect to have left?
If you play with perfect basic strategy, the house edge is probably about 0.5%. (That varies based on the rules in place – it might be as high as 1%.)
If you bet $4500 and lose 0.5% of it, you’re looking at a total loss of $22.50. Even if you lose 1% of it, you’ll lose $45.
$300 minus losses of $45 leaves you with $255, which is a profit of $155 on your $100 deposit.
I have a friend who uses bonuses at 10 different casinos to put together enough money to buy a jukebox for his mancave.
But you can’t do this anymore.
I explain why in this next section.
How Online Casinos Prevent Bonus Abuse
The people running online casinos aren’t idiots. They wouldn’t be able to afford to be in the casino business if they were. They figured out what bonus abusers were up to quickly.
How did they decide to thwart these advantage players?
The first thing they did was increase the wagering requirements. It used to be common to find casinos with wagering requirements of 15X or 12X or even less.
Now, you’ll have a hard time finding a casino with wagering requirements of less than 35X your deposit plus bonus.
To top that off, most online casinos only allow wagers on their slot machines to count toward your wagering requirements. No one knows what the house edge is for a slot machine game at an online casino, but I can promise it’s higher than 1%.
Chances are that the house edge for a slot machine game is at least 5%.
Now change those parameters for our example from the last section. You have $300, but now you’re required to make 35X $300 in wagers, which is $10,500.
5% of $10,500 is $525.
Of course, you might get lucky and win, but that’s not the expectation. Even if you somewhat better than the expectation, the casino has a big cushion built in there.
Taking advantage of casino bonuses is not the way to win at online casinos every time – not anymore.
To Dream the Impossible Dream
No one can tell you how to win at online casinos every time you play. The best I can do is to tell you how to at online casinos sometimes.
And that’s not hard to explain:
You can win at online casinos occasionally by getting lucky.
Keep your playing sessions short, cash out when you hit a win goal, and only play with money you can afford losing.
I’d even suggest changing your definition of winning slightly. Instead of thinking about how much profit you’re going to make, think about how much fun you’re having in exchange for your money.
I have a friend I used to work with who’s a gambling addict. He’s a card counter, and he’s been backed off at multiple brick and mortar casinos.
But put him in front of a computer screen, and he becomes a mad man. I had to loan him money multiple times to cover his rent because he’d lost so much playing real money online blackjack.
Don’t be like that guy.
Consider yourself a winner every time you’re able to pay your rent because you didn’t gamble it away at an online casino.
Conclusion
No one can teach you how to win at online casinos every time. It’s just not possible.
The best you can hope for is to win at online casinos every once in a while. Even that’s not the easiest thing to do. The odds are stacked against you.