1. Win Money In Vegas Like A Pro - How To Win Big Money In Las Vegas
2. How Much Money To Gamble In Vegas Besides

Apr 29, 2008 On one of my first trips to vegas ( i had just turned 21 and did not have much money ) I pulled a 100$ bill out of the ATM and turned it into 1000 on the first day. I lost some of that back before left the city, but still managed to gamble for 4 days and walk out with a proift. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority Visitor Profile Study (which we cited in a recent question about first-timers), visitors to Las Vegas had an average gambling budget in 2016 of $619.01, up from $484.70 in 2012 $529.57 in 2013 $530.11 in 2014. Top 10 Las Vegas Tips. Hotel rooms often cost three to four times as much on the weekends as during the week! Plus, with weekend crowds you'll wait in line for everything.Mid-week visitors save tons of money and have a much better time.

I’m just an average guy who loves Las Vegas gambling. I’ve spent years visiting Sin City and playing casino games there. I’ve won and lost fortunes.

After gaining all that experience, I’ve realized that much of what’s written on the Internet about Las Vegas gambling causes mistakes—big mistakes that cost you more money than you probably realize.

Below I’ve listed and explained these 7 Las Vegas gambling mistakes that you’re probably making.

1. You’re Staying at the Wrong Casinos and Hotels

This mistake probably applies to everyone, but for different reasons. If you’re a luxury traveler who loves a specific resort in the city, you’re probably costing yourself money by not taking advantage of some of the specials available at the other resorts in town. On the other hand, you might be a budget traveler who only stays at fleabags, not realizing that you can get a better property for the same price.

You might be someone who only stays in Vegas on the weekend. That’s a big mistake, as the prices on the rooms skyrocket on Friday and Saturday nights.

But staying mid-week doesn’t guarantee you the best rate, either. You might be traveling during a convention, in which case the mid-week rates might even be higher than the typical weekend prices.

The mistake you’re making is not paying enough attention to detail and not putting enough effort into your planning.

The more flexible you can be with where and when you’re staying, the better value you’re going to see for your money.

This means spending a little more time in advance doing the planning, but it pays off, especially if you’re staying for 4 or 5 nights.

Shop around—not just for hotels, but also for dates.

You can find other interesting ways to save money on your hotel stay, too. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, you can buy other people’s unused hotel reservations and save up to 74% on your stay. You can find these deals on RoomerTravel.com.

2. You’re Spending Too Much Money on Airfare

Most people don’t put as much thought into their airline tickets as they do their casino/hotel stay.

But you can save a lot of money on airfare by just paying attention to a couple of tips:

According to Hopper.com, the optimal time for getting the best rate on your airline tickets is 14 days prior to your arrival. They claim that you can save $200 by booking at least 2 weeks in advance.

But, as it turns out, you don’t save much more money by booking further ahead than that.

Why do airline prices work this way?

It’s all about supply and demand. The longer you wait to book your tickets, the fewer tickets are available. The airline can charge more for those tickets.

Look at it this way:

Suppose you own the world’s smallest airline, and you only have a single airplane with 100 seats on it.

And let’s also suppose that, just for simplicity’s sake, that you only have one flight per day.

This means on any given day, you can sell anywhere from 0 to 100 tickets.

If it’s Friday, and you have a flight scheduled for Monday with 50 unsold tickets, you’re likely to reduce the prices for those tickets.

You want to fill those seats.

The cost of the flight for the airline is the same regardless of whether the seats are full.

The process of pricing these tickets is the same process the hotels use to price their rooms. Less availability means a higher price.

This is called revenue management.

You can also save money flying to Vegas on a Sunday and returning on a Tuesday. The same reasons apply—supply and demand. Most people have time off during the weekend, but even if they don’t, they’re not usually taking time off work at the beginning of the week.

This means that fewer people are traveling on those dates, so the rates are lower to stimulate more activity.

If you’re committed to getting the best price on your airfare, book your flights 2 weeks in advance, depart on a Sunday, return on a Tuesday, and travel in August or October.

3. You’re Spending Too Much Money on the Attractions

Some people go to Las Vegas just to gamble. Others like to gamble and drink. And there are degenerates who visit Sin City to gamble, drink, and visit strip clubs. (I don’t judge.)

But most people visiting Las Vegas are there to see some of the attractions, too.

As with airfare and hotel rooms, you can spend a lot of money on these attractions or just a little.

One of the easiest ways to save money on attractions in Las Vegas is to stick with the attractions that don’t cost much to begin with.

Vegas.com offers a list of 20 things you can see and do there for less than $20. Attractions on that list include the Mobster Museum, the Neon Graveyard, and Brooklyn Bowl.

But you can also find lists of free things to do in Las Vegas. Travel and Leisure has a list of over 30 free attractions in the city.

I suggest you bookmark that link.

That way if you lose all your money at the craps table, you can still find something to do during the rest of your vacation. Being broke in Vegas isn’t the same as being broke in other cities. You can still find plenty to do.

4. You’re Spending Too Much on Transportation

You don’t just have to get to Las Vegas and find a place to stay. You must also get to and from the airport.

And most places in Vegas, even those on the Strip, are too far to walk.

You can spend a fortune on cab fare.

But that’s not a requirement for getting around.

According to TripAdvisor, you can get a 24-hour pass to use the bus in Las Vegas for just $8.

And the bus system is Las Vegas is far more convenient and accessible than you probably think.

There are 2 bus routes on the Strip:

1. The Deuce – This route runs 24 hours a day and shows up every 12 to 30 minutes at almost every hotel on the Strip.
2. The Strip & Downtown Express – This route runs from 9am to half past midnight. It leaves every 12 to 15 minutes most of the time, although it runs less frequently early in the morning. You can use this bus to get to and from Downtown and the Strip.

Maybe the bus isn’t for you, but you can’t beat the price.

Another strategy for getting around is staying someplace that’s located walking distance from a lot of the things you want to do.

I like staying in Downtown. Everything in Glitter Gulch is walking distance.

The Strip, on the other hand, is far longer than you might imagine—especially during the summer.

But you can still find plenty of hotels and casinos that are centrally located to lots of things to do. I like Planet Hollywood for its location, in fact.

5. You’re Spending Too Much Money on Food

Las Vegas is one place where you don’t have to spend a lot of money eating. In fact, if you gamble even a little bit, you can get free meals at most casinos. It might just be breakfast in the coffee shop, but that’s a meal I never miss anyway.

Vegas Solo suggests that the best way to save money dining in Vegas is to stay out of the restaurants on the Strip. They even offer a list of some of the best meals in town for the budget conscious. Some of these include:

1. Ellis Island is one of the classic Vegas budget meals. You can get a steak dinner there for $6.99 any time of day.
2. The California’s Market Street Café is another example of a classic pennies-on-the-dollar meal in Las Vegas. You can get the prime rib special there for $7.95.
3. Planet Hollywood’s Earl of Sandwich offers breakfast sandwiches for just $4.

Another strategy for saving money on food is to eat at happy hour. Yeah, most people think of happy hour as a time to get cheap drinks, but why worry about drink prices when you can drink for free just for sitting in front of a slot machine game?

No, happy hour is a great opportunity to get cheap food. A lot of the places offering food during happy hour have meals for $6 or $7. Vegas.com suggests Culinary Dropout from 3pm to 6pm Monday through Friday. You can get grilled cheese sliders and meat loaf sandwiches there for $6.

Diablo’s Cantina has tacos for $4, and their happy hour runs 7 days a week from 3pm to 7pm. Being a good Texas, I love tacos, and I don’t mind paying $4 for them, either.

6. You’re Wasting Money Gambling

You’ll find plenty of advice on the Internet about how to get the best odds when you’re gambling, but what most of these sites neglect to mention is that…

Clever gambling writers suggest that you should think of casino games as an entertainment expense, and there’s much to be said for that mindset. But most don’t go into enough detail about how to estimate what a given casino game is going to cost.

Here’s how to do that:

First, understand that in the long run, the house edge is a fair estimate of how much of each bet you’ll lose when playing your favorite casino games.

Roulette has a house edge of 5.26%. If you’re betting $100 per spin, you’re expected to lose an average of $5.26 per bet.

But that’s an average over a long period of time—hundreds, maybe thousands, of spins.

No one would play a gambling game where they bet $100 and won back $94.74 every time they placed a bet.

But play long enough, and that will be close to your outcome.

But in the short run, here’s what happens:

In the extreme short run (a single bet), you either lose your entire bet, or you win a multiple of that bet.

An Example Using Roulette

The easiest example is an even-money bet (red or black, odd or even, high or low). If you win, you win the amount of your bet.

If you play one spin and win, you win $100 on a $100 bet. But if you lose, then you lose your $100 bet. Neither of those cases come anywhere near the expectation of losing $5.26 on that bet.

But suppose you place 38 bets in a row, and you land on every slot on the wheel. How much will you win, and how much will you lose in that situation?

You have 38 slots on the wheel. 2 of them are green, 18 of them are red, and 18 of them are black. Let’s assume you always bet on black (as Wesley Snipes suggests). You’ll win your bet 18 times, and you’ll lose your bet 20 times.

You’ll win $1800 on the 18 winning bets. You’ll lose $2000 on the 20 losing bets. Your net loss is $200 ($2000 – $1800).

If you average that $200 by the total number of bets you made (38), you’ll see that you lost $5.26 per bet, on average.

Of course, even if you place 38 bets in a row, you won’t see mathematically perfect results. You’ll see the same number come up twice or three times. You’ll see some numbers not come up at all.

The Law of Large Numbers

This is where the law of large numbers comes in. The more you play, the closer your results eventually start to look like the mathematical expectation.

But just knowing how much you expect to lose per bet doesn’t tell you how expensive the entertainment is. You have to measure a couple of other factors.

One way to consider entertainment costs is by looking at how much time you’ve been entertained.

For example, if you buy a novel with 600 pages that takes 10 hours to read for $7.99, you’ve been entertained for about 80 cents per hour.

On the other hand, if you go to a 2 hour movie for $9, your entertainment cost is $4.50 per hour.

You can estimate the same calculation with a gambling game.

Casino Games’ Average Bets per Hour

You just need to know how many bets per hour you’re going to make on average.

This varies by game:

• Baccarat at a full table = 15 bets per hour
• Blackjack at a full table = 50 bets per hour
• Blackjack one-on-one with the dealer = 250 bets per hour
• Craps = 100 bets per hour
• Mini Baccarat one-on-one = 200 bets per hour
• Roulette = 40 bets per hour
• Slot machines or video poker = 600 bets per hour

Once you know how many bets per hour you’re making, you can multiply that by how much you’re betting per bet to find out how much money you’re putting into action each hour. Multiply that number by the house edge, and you know what your hourly expected loss is.

You’re playing blackjack one-on-one with a dealer at $100 per hand, and the house edge is 0.5%. 250 hands per hour multiplied by $100 is $25,000 in action per hour.

Your expected hourly loss is 0.5% of that, or $125 per hour.

On the other hand, let’s say you’re playing craps and betting the pass line only. The house edge on that bet is 1.41%. $100 per bet multiplied by 100 bets per hour is $10,000 in action per hour.

1.41% of that is $141 per hour.

Craps is only slightly more expensive than blackjack in this situation, but consider this, too:

Not everyone who thinks they’re good at basic blackjack strategy are good at it. That 0.5% assumes perfect basic strategy.

Let’s assume you’re not good at basic strategy, and you make enough mistakes that your house edge is 1%. That’s not uncommon at all, in fact.

Now your hourly expected loss at the one-on-one blackjack game is $250, which is a lot higher than at the craps table.

And the beauty of that craps bet is that it doesn’t take any kind of strategic thinking at all.

Win Money In Vegas Like A Pro - How To Win Big Money In Las Vegas

How does the hourly expected loss at these table games compare to slot machines?

Most people aren’t going to risk $100 on a single slot machine, but let’s assume that you’re willing to play for $5 a spin. At 600 spins per hour, that’s $3000 in hourly action.

But the house edge on slots varies. It’s probably at least 5%, but it’s more likely to be in the 7% range.

$3000 at 5% is $150 per hour, but at 7%, it’s $210 per hour.

Even though the size of your bet on the slot machine game is only 5% the size of your bet at those table games, your expected hourly loss is still in that $150 – $250 range.

Of course, you can reduce any of these factors to reduce your hourly expected loss.

For example, if you played that slot machine more slowly—at half the speed—you’d only lose $75 or $105 per hour.

If you take a 15-minute break at the blackjack table every hour, you’ll reduce the amount you lose per hour playing blackjack by $30 or so.

Or you could play blackjack at a full table and get fewer hands per hour that way.

You can also bet less, but reducing the size of your wagers decreases the excitement factor.

Think about it this way:

Suppose you’re playing roulette for a penny per spin, and you’re making single number bets. Those bets pay off at 35 to 1.

How excited are you going to bet at winning 35 cents?

Compare that to the excitement of winning $3500 on a $100 bet.

How do you know how much you should be betting?

I like a concept I read about in a book by John Vorhaus called Poker Night. He was writing about how to set the stakes for a poker game, but the concept applies equally well to casino games.

He suggests having a “gulp limit”.

The idea is that you buy in for an amount that would make you swallow hard if you had that much money in your wallet and lost it.

This amount varies based on your temperament and how much money you have.

Some people might swallow hard if they lose a wallet with $5 in it.

Other people might not bat an eye at losing a wallet with $500 in it.

The point is that gambling is meaningless unless you have a meaningful amount of money on the line.

I’d be bored silly playing penny slots for an hour.

But increase the amount I’m betting per spin to $5, and I’m a lot more interested.

Common sense applies, too.

If you’re struggling to make a $1000 a month rent payment, you have no business plopping down at the blackjack table and making $100 bets.

That’s not entertainment.

That’s just foolishness.

7. You’ve Joined the Players Club

If you pay attention to almost every other gambling writer in the world, you’ve read the advice that you’re supposed to always join the players club at the casino.

And yes, there are advantages to being a member of the players club.

You get a tiny percentage of your overall action back in the form of rebates and free stuff.

Here’s what you trade for those tiny rebates:

Privacy.

That might not sound like a big deal, but think about it. You have entities with staggering amounts of money tracking every penny you spend while you’re gambling.

Their goal when tracking that spend is to determine what marketing buttons to push to get you to spend more money.

The casino can use this information to send you hyper-targeted direct-mail advertising to convince you to visit more often than you might otherwise.

This means spending more money gambling than you might do otherwise.

And if this kind of marketing weren’t profitable (EXTREMELY profitable), the casino wouldn’t provide the rebates at all.

You visit a casino 4 times a year in Las Vegas. You spend an average of 2 days there each trip, and you spend 4 hours gambling each day.

The casino expects you to lose $500 per trip, 4 times a year, or $2000.

But they can tell by your action that you love playing Wheel of Fortune slots.

In fact, they can tell that this is far and away the most popular game among slot machine players. As a result, they decide to hold a slot machine tournament featuring that game on a specific set of dates—a set of dates you wouldn’t normally be visiting.

They send you mailers inviting you to the tournament.

You decide to make an extra trip to Vegas for the tournament, so you lose $500 more that year than you would otherwise.

For many people, this isn’t a significant amount of money.

But for the average American, it is a significant amount of money. The average person in the United States earns about $50,000 a year.

Gambling losses of $2500 a year represent 2.5% of that person’s income.

And that doesn’t include the cost of getting to and from Vegas and the cost of staying there.

Let’s assume you spend an extra $200 flying out there for the tournament and an extra $300 on lodging. Those expenses count, too.

You might say that since you’re so well-informed about these kinds of advertising tactics that you’d be immune to them.

And you might be right.

But according to Cultwatch, you should beware of thinking you’re immune to mind control.

Just knowing how mind control and persuasion tactics work isn’t sufficient defense against such things.

I just pass on the players club.

It isn’t a fair trade.

Conclusion

You can make a lot of mistakes gambling in Las Vegas.

But you can easily avoid most of them, too.

And honestly, not all the mistakes I’ve listed are what you would consider mistakes. Some of these are just matters of personal preference.

As with most things in gambling (and life, for that matter), a little mindfulness goes a long way.

Learning how to win money in a Las Vegas casino isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do. People win money in Vegas casinos every day, in fact.

Looking to visit an online casino instead? Check out one of the sites above!

But the odds are against you.

That’s why the casinos are still in business and make so much money. They’ve designed the games and payouts so that you can’t win in the long run. They even have a word for the mathematical disadvantage the games offer you—it’s called “the house edge.”

The good news is that the house edge is a long-term phenomenon. Anyone can win money gambling in the short term. In fact, if they couldn’t, the casinos would go out of business because no one would play there.

Some gamblers do a better job of winning money at Vegas casinos than others, though. This post looks at what they do differently so that you can do it, too.

1- Build a Gambling Bankroll

The first step to winning money in a Las Vegas casino is having a gambling bankroll. This is money that you’ve set aside for the purpose of gambling with. It should be money you don’t need for other purposes.

The reason you need a gambling bankroll is because you can’t win money without first risking money. That’s how gambling works. And if you don’t set aside money for this purpose, you’re liable to bet money you can’t afford to lose just to get into and/or stay in action.

How big a bankroll do you need?

If your goal is to stay in action forever at a negative expectation game, you need an infinitely large bankroll. Luckily, that’s not the goal for most thinking people.

You should base the size of your bankroll on your goals. Which games do you want to play? How much are you planning to bet at that game? How much time do you want to spend gambling?

If you want to play blackjack for $100/hand, you need more than $200 to get in any time at the table. Lose 2 bets in a row, and you’re out of action almost immediately. That’s no fun. Most people want to spend more than 5 minutes at the gambling table.

With a blackjack bankroll of $200, though, you might be able to play for an hour or 2 at the $5 tables.

Frank Scoblete offers interesting bankroll management advice for gamblers who play casino games. These are usually based on what it takes to make a quick win. Some of his money management techniques are misleading, as they don’t increase your probability of winning. But his bankroll management advice can help you avoid going broke before getting your fill of fun at the table.

Scoblete suggests having a bankroll of 1000 units for a casino visit, and dividing it up as follows:

• 800 units for blackjack
• 130 units for craps
• 10 units for roulette
• 10 units for baccarat
• 40 units for poker
• 1 unit for video poker
• 9 units for sports betting

According to Scoblete, this works out to this much gambling on your gaming activities:

• 4 hours a day for blackjack
• 2 hours a day for craps
• 1 hour for all the other games

Obviously, you can see that blackjack and craps are far and away his recommended games. In this respect, at least, Scoblete is on the money. These are probably the best 2 casino games you can play, especially if you can avoid the sucker bets at the craps table.

More about those in the next section…

2- Stay Away from the Sucker Bets

Some casino games offer nothing but sucker bets.

But what’s that mean?

A sucker bet is a bet that only suckers make because the house edge is so much higher than it needs to be. An example of a sucker bet is the game of keno, which usually has a house edge of 15% or higher. (And I’m being generous with that number—most keno games have a house edge of 25% or more, making it marginally better than the lottery, but not by much.)

Some gamblers think American roulette is a sucker bet because of its house edge of 5.26%. If you’re playing in a casino that offers both American roulette and European roulette (which has a house edge of 2.70% or 1.35% depending on the rules), American roulette is certainly a sucker bet. But if American roulette is the only option available, and if you really enjoy the game, it’s not really a sucker bet.

Other casino games, though, have multiple betting options. Some of them have a low house edge, while others have a ridiculously high edge. Craps is the best example of this kind of game. The basic bet in craps is the pass line bet, which has a house edge of 1.41%.

But the proposition bets at the craps table have house edge figures well in excess of 10%. You’d have to be a sucker to place a bet at a table that will result in 7X or 8X the losses in the same time.

How do you know which games and which bets are the sucker bets?

Just spend some time researching the house edge for various games. Baccarat, blackjack, craps, and video poker traditionally offer the best odds. Slot machines and keno are on the other end of the spectrum, offering the worst odds in the casino.

Most of the other games are somewhere in between.

Of course, unless you’re an advantage player (like a card counter), all casino games have a negative expectation. This means if you play long enough, you’ll eventually lose all your money. From the perspective of an advantage gambler, who only bets when he has an edge, all these casino games offer sucker bets.

But for the recreational gambler, your goal should be to get maximum game fun for the least amount of money. Your goal should also be to walk away a winner if you can.

Your best chance of doing so is to stick with the games with the best odds.

Poker games are another thing, entirely. That’s a game of skill, and I encourage you to learn to play poker and play it well. Since you’re competing with other poker players for their money, you don’t have to worry about a house edge. You just need to be more skilled than most of the other players at the table.

Sports betting is another thing, too. The bookmakers set up the odds so that they’re going to make a profit, so it’s hard to get an edge, but they’re not perfect. If you’re better at picking winners than they are, you can get an edge over the books, too. In fact, if you’re really good at handicapping, your best chance of leaving the casino with a lot of money is by putting money into action in the sports book.

3- Stick with a Strategy for the Game You’re Playing

Most games have no strategy other than avoiding the worst bets at the table. Some games require you to make decisions about how to play your hand, though. The latter are the games with the best odds.

No matter which kind of game you play, you should go into it with a strategy and stick with that strategy. Ignore your hunches and psychic insights about what’s going to happen next. Just make the best possible bets you can.

Roulette is a game with a simple strategy. Most casinos in Las Vegas offer what’s called “American” roulette. Every bet on that roulette game but one offers a house edge of 5.26%.

There’s one exception:

The 5-number bet has a house edge of 7.89%. Since that’s significantly more than all the other bets at the table, the best strategy is to never make that bet.

You can then decide how you want to bet on the other roulette numbers based on your tolerance for risk and your desire for a big payout. If you like frequent small wins, stick with the even-money bets. The probability of winning those bets is close to 50% (47.37%), but you only win even money.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind losing for a while, you can place a single number bet. That pays off at 35 to 1, but the probability of winning that bet is only 1/38, or 2.63%.

You can also place a plethora of bets with payouts and probabilities between those 2 options.

With a game like blackjack, though, the house edge varies based on how well you play your hands. In blackjack, there’s a mathematically correct move to make in every possible situation. This is called “basic strategy.”

A player using basic strategy in blackjack only faces a house edge of 0.5% to 1%. If you ignore basic strategy and just play your hunches, you’re probably giving the house an extra 3% to 4%.

That’s a huge difference. If you’re going to play blackjack, you should at least learn a simplified version of basic strategy to keep the house edge as low as possible

Also, even if you use perfect basic strategy in blackjack, the house still has an edge. Play long enough, and you’ll lose all your money.

But when you reduce the house edge as much as possible, you increase the probability of walking away from a Las Vegas casino as a winner.

You can find detailed articles about every casino game you can imagine on this site. Those articles all cover the appropriate strategies to use for these games.

4- Quit While You’re Ahead

How Much Money To Gamble In Vegas Besides

No one can win money in a Las Vegas casino if they continue to play. Since the casino games have an edge, you’re likelier to lose than win, and every bet you make brings you that much closer to the long run. The Law of Large Numbers suggests that the more trials you get involved in, the closer your actual results will mirror the mathematically expected results.

This means that if you hit a big win early in your casino visit, it’s a good idea to set aside at least some of those winnings rather than gambling them all. I once won $6000 on a slot machine on my 6th spin of the reels. I immediately cashed out and set $3000 aside to make sure I could go home with a profit. (My bankroll for the entire trip was $1000, so I still had about $4000 to play with for the rest of my stay in Vegas.)

You’ll find some writers talking about money management and the importance of setting win goals and loss limits. An example of a win goal is someone with a $1000 bankroll who decides he’ll quit once he’s ahead by $200. That’s a win goal of 20%.

A stop loss limit, on the other hand, is an amount of money you’re willing to lose before quitting. With a $1000 bankroll and a 20% stop loss limit, a gambler would quit when his bankroll got down to $800.

Here’s the thing about win goals, stop loss limits, and money management:

None of these techniques change the house edge. No matter when you walk away from the tables, unless you walk away permanently, the house edge will eventually come into play in your casino game hobby.

Yes, you should quit when you get ahead.

Or at least set aside enough winnings that you can go home a winner.

Just realize that this concept doesn’t increase your chances of winning money in a Las Vegas casino in the long run. It just makes sure that you sometimes go home a winner. You’ll go home a loser more often, but not as often if you occasionally quit while you’re ahead.

5- Don’t Be Afraid to Go Big or Go Home

The last time I visited the Winstar, I had a small bankroll of just $200.

But I also had a plan.

I was going to bet $100 on odd. We chose that because my traveling companions and I decide that we were all odd people, so that might be lucky for us. (I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the odds of winning were 47.37% regardless of whether we bet on odd or even.)

That was half my total bankroll for the trip on a single bet. I wanted to go big or go home. I was going to use the other $100 to bet on craps, actually, but I was just going to stick with the $5 bets.

But it was a Saturday night at the Winstar, and they only recently started offering real roulette and real craps. Prior to this change, they generated results using playing cards instead of wheels and dice.

As a result, the tables were so crowded I couldn’t get anywhere near them. I wound up playing Lightning Sevens and The Big Lebowski slot machines, instead.

I still broke even for the night, but that was all luck.

Still, there’s much to be said for making one big bet instead of making lots of small bets. I’ve written about something called “maximum boldness” in gambling before. The idea is that making a single big bet on a negative expectation game offers you a better probability of doubling your money than making any combination of multiple, smaller bets.

This is because of the Law of Large Numbers, which I think I’ve already mentioned.

Here’s the easiest way to understand it, though:

You goal is to make $1000 on a single bet in roulette. You choose black (or any other even number.) You have 2 possible outcomes:

1. You could win $1000.
2. You could lose $1000.

Possibility #2 is more likely, but those are still the only 2 possibilities.

Now suppose you make 2 bets of $500 each. Here are the possible outcomes:

1. You could win both bets, for a $1000 profit.
2. You could win bet #1 and lose bet #2, which results in you breaking even.
3. You could win bet #2 and lose bet #1, which also results in you breaking even.
4. You could lose both bets, for a $1000 loss.

The likelihood of these events varies, but you’re more likely to lose both bets than you are to win both bets. That’s obvious. But you also have 2 other possibilities which are also pretty likely.

And obviously, the more bets you make, the more possibilities are out there. Suppose you make 4 bets of $250 each:

1. You could win all 4, doubling your money.
2. You could win 3 and lose 1, which would result in a profit.
3. You could win 1 and lose 3, which would result in a loss.
4. You could win 2 bets and lose 2 bets, which could happen in multiple ways, and you’d break even.
5. You could lose all 4 bets.

The reason casinos make money is because they’re in it for the long run.

Wanna beat the casinos?

Decide to get happy with wins in the short run.

6- Spend Some Time Doing Other Things in Las Vegas, Too

It’s hard to win money on any kind of gambling if you’re tired or bored. Gambling is supposed to be fun. If you’re gambling compulsively to the point where you’re uninterested in any other activity, you’re in trouble.

Luckily, in Las Vegas, you can find lots of things to do. Heck, just walking around Downtown or the Las Vegas Strip can be loads of fun. There are free shows right on The Strip, too—the water fountains at the Bellagio and the pirate show at the Mirage cost you nothing. You can even go see circus acts at Circus Circus.

Spend some of your entertainment money on other forms of entertainment. Think about hitting a couple of the cool museums in town. Whether you like organized crime or nuclear experiments, Las Vegas has a museum to help educate you about it.

And you won’t find a better selection of shows anywhere on the planet.

The number and variety of bars and nightclubs is staggering. So is the number of restaurants.

Don’t just gamble.

Enjoy some of what else Vegas has to offer.

7- Learn How to Play Poker, Please

If I could convince you of one thing, it’s this:

If you want to win money in a Las Vegas casino, stay away from the “casino games” entirely and play poker.

Not all Vegas casinos have cardrooms, but find one that does. Learn how to play poker and learn how to play the game well.

The skill element is what sets poker apart from the other games. The casinos take a 5% cut of every pot, which means you can’t just sit down and break even.

But it takes less study and effort than you might think to become a break-even poker player. With a little effort, you can make a long-term profit at the Texas holdem tables.

90% of poker players don’t profit, but that means 10% of the players do. That’s a bigger percentage of Vegas winners than you’ll find playing slot machines, I promise you.

Conclusion

Anyone can come home after winning some money in Las Vegas. People do it every day. It’s easier to pull off if you stick with the games offering better bets.

Of course, learning the right strategies for the games you’re playing helps, too. Being able to distinguish between good and bad bets is one critical skill. But in games like blackjack and video poker, you must be able to make the decisions offering the best expected value, too.

Finally, if you really want to win money in Las Vegas casinos in the long run, become a solid poker player.