If you want to learn how to make money at the casino more often, you’ll find the contents of this page extremely useful.
Gamblerspro.com is run by a team of casino experts that have decades of experience playing, analyzing, and figuring out casino games. Over the course of our careers, we’ve learned every trick in the casino playbook, and we understand that the best way to make money at a casino is to follow a few core principles.
You need to read these, digest them, and ingrain them into your playing habits. If you do, you’ll make money gambling more often. At the very least, you’ll lose less, which is just as good!
How to Make Money at the Casino 101
We’re not into voodoo and woo. We take a scientific, rational approach to casino games. Therefore, all of our tips for making money at the casino are grounded in verifiable reality.
Understand Casino House Edge
House edge is a concept that experienced players are familiar with, but that many new or even intermediate players don’t even know exists. It’s incredibly important because the house edge of a game quite literally determines your chances of winning it.
The house edge is the casino’s mathematical advantage. To make money at the casino consistently, you need to study the house edge of each game. For example, when you play blackjack with basic strategy, the house edge is under 0.5%. That means that for every $100 wagered, the casino makes around $0.50.
Compare that to keno. This is a fun lotto game with much bigger potential wins than a card game like blackjack, but the house edge can be as high as 35%. Yup, that means that the casino wins up to $35 out of every $100 wagered, despite paying out massive keno jackpots.
If you want to make money playing casino games, you need to understand the house edge of the most popular games of chance, and you need to play the games with the lowest house edge. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
It’s important to know that house edge can also apply to specific bets within a game. For example, in craps, taking the odds has a house edge of 0%, whereas hard ways bets on 6 or 8 can have a house edge of up to 9.09%. Generally speaking, bets with higher payouts will have a higher house edge.
It pays (literally) to properly study the casino games you want to play. The best games to play at the casino all have a house edge under 2%.
Manage Your Bankroll
In most casino games, you can’t control much. You can try a few gambling strategies and make smart bets, but in the vast majority of games, you’re throwing yourself at the feet of lady luck and hoping she’ll shower you with coin.
That’s fine, but there’s one thing you absolutely can control, and you definitely should. You can control how you manage your bankroll, and experienced players know that doing so is the way to make money at a casino more often. You’ll make money at the casino more often by conserving your bankroll.
For example, let’s say that you have a $100 bankroll and that through your studies, you’ve learned that blackjack has one of the lowest house edges, and you intend to start building your bankroll by playing it first. You can choose to maker 10x $10 wagers and hope for the best, or you can make 100x $1 wagers and play more hands.
We recommend taking the second route. Play as many hands as possible, and don’t bet more than 1% of your bankroll until you’re in house money. Once you have increased your bankroll by at least 10%, you can start taking bigger risks with the money you’ve already won. For example, you could place a pairs side bet with potential 25:1 payouts, or you could bet more aggressively by doubling your bet size.
If you blow what you’ve won by being more aggressive, turn the dial down again and bet more cautiously. Go back to the 1% per bet rule until you hit another lucky streak and rebuild your balance.
Some players also like to split their bankroll across games. For example, let’s say we go back to when you’re 20% up in blackjack. Why not take some of those winnings and play a jackpot slot? Yes, the house edge will be much greater, but you could win tens of thousands or even millions on a single lucky spin. If you don’t win, you can head back to the blackjack tables and rebuild your balance.
We won’t labour over this point too much longer. Hopefully, you can now see how bankroll management works and why it’s the best way to win money at a casino. All pro gamblers know that bankroll management works.
Measure Risk vs. Reward on Every Bet
There are lots of risky betting systems promoted across the web. We don’t advocate for any of them. For example, we’ve proven that none of the most common roulette systems work. They can give you a temporary boost if you’re lucky, but they will do nothing to change the odds in your favour in the long run.
Zooming in on the Martingale System for a moment to make our point, let’s see how it works. In this system, you double down on losing even-money bets in roulette. For example, if you bet $1 on red and lose, you bet $2, then $4, and so on.
Sounds great, and in theory, you will win back everything you have lost when the winning spin comes. However, exponential growth is something we don’t intuitively understand, but it can get out of control really quickly.
Run the numbers on an eight loss streak starting with $1. You’ll be betting $255 on the eighth spin to try to win back $1. That’s NOT a smart bet, and we’ve seen losing streaks extend to 15 spins or more.
You always want to bet less than you stand to gain. Anything else is too risky and will destroy your bankroll fast. You’ll get away with it for a while, but eventually, lady luck will punish you for being so careless. Trust us; we’ve been there many times. If you want to win money gambling, be conservative and grind out a small win on low-risk games, then risk what you’ve won on high-risk, high-payout games like slots. Eventually, you’ll hit a winning spin that puts you way ahead.
Learn How to Wager Bonuses
This applies specifically to online casinos, but it still falls well within the topic of this article, which is making money at casinos.
One of the major advantages that online casinos give you is bonuses that you just won’t get at land-based venues. When was the last time you walked into a casino, turned $100 into chips, and the cashier gave you another $100 to play with? Probably never, right? Yet, almost every top online casino worth its salt will give you at least a 100% welcome bonus.
However, these bonuses come with a catch. You can’t just cash them out and withdraw them. You have to wager them, which means you have to bet them a certain number of times first. A reasonable wagering requirement is 20x. You’ll have to wager $2,000 to withdraw that $100 bonus.
That’s not as difficult as it sounds if you know what you’re doing. We’ve written a complete guide on how to beat wagering requirements . Read it, and you’ll understand that wagering bonuses is the easiest way to win money at a casino.
Set and Stick to Your Goals
Ask the average casino player what their goal is, and they’ll give you a vague answer 99% of the time. It’ll either be “make some money” or “have some fun.” We will bet you that most of these people will walk away minus their entire bankroll at the end of the night.
Why? Because they’ll get carried away, just like the casino wants them to, and even if they win, they’ll get greedy and blow it. Even the most rational people you know can become wildly greedy and unreasonable in a casino. That’s not surprising; everything about a casino is designed to cause you to lose track of time and to seduce you into playing just one more hand or spin. This is why so few make money at the casino.
The best way to win at the casino is to have win and loss limits that you have decided before you go in. For example, if you’ve increased your $100 to $200, it really is a good time to walk away. If you’re shooting for bigger money, take a percentage of that $100 you’ve won, say 20% or $20, and play a slot machine. If you don’t win, get out of there before you give the casino back everything and then some.
Be aware of human weaknesses such as the need to chase losses and the tendency to get greedy and combat them with rationality and math. You know that the house edge is going to beat you if you stay, so walk away before it gets the better of you.
Win Real Money at the Casino – Conclusion
We told you at the start that we don’t do magical thinking and woo. What we’ve given you here are five practical, rational ways to make money at the casino. They won’t work every time, and sometimes you just have a rotten night, but they’ll definitely help you lower the casino’s advantage and avoid the mistakes we all make.
When you’re ready to make some money at the casino, choose one of the top casino sites and try these tips out.
Greg has been an avid gambler for over 15 years. He loves slot machines and betting on football. He’s been writing on the subject for close to a decade now and knows everything there is to know about video slots, jackpots, and slot sites in general! He has been writing for GamblersPro.com for over five years now.
