For players, the casino is a fun way to lose and possibly win some money, but for the casino, it’s a very lucrative business. In a game of luck, it might seem odd that casinos can make so much money but they do because of the house edge. The house edge is the ratio of the average loss of a bet; it’s basically how likely a casino is to win any bet. The higher the house edge, the more profitable a game is for a casino, so both gamblers and casinos have a firm interest in which games are the fairest.
Craps
It’s hard to find craps on online casinos, which many casinos state is because it’s not as popular as it used to be. However, there might be another reason: it’s the only game in the whole casino where the house has absolutely no edge on some of the bets. Craps games have lots of different kinds of bets, but there is one bet that the vast majority of players make at some point in a session – the “pass line” bet.
If you’re new to craps, the pass line bet might be a good place to start, but it has a 1.41% house edge. When you bet on Odds, whether they’re 4 or 10, 5 or 9, or 6 or 8, you enjoy a 0% house edge. That means if you keep making those bets ad infinitum, you will statistically break even. That’s just about as good as it gets when it comes to casino games and probabilities.
Baccarat
Baccarat is a card game that’s simple to describe: a player and a banker see who has the higher card. You can bet on the player, the banker, or both, to win the game. It has been popular among the French nobles since the 1800s and was played in private game rooms before casinos were legalized in 1907.
Baccarat is much more popular in online casinos than craps, with places like Unibet online casino even offering live streams of the game. Baccarat only has a house edge of 1.06% when you bet on the banker, 1.24% when you bet on the player, but a huge 14.36% when you bet on them having the same score.
Blackjack or 21
Blackjack is hailed by many as the fairest casino game you can play (likely because they’re unfamiliar with craps). That being said, blackjack does have a very small house edge, only 0.28% when you play with Liberal Vegas rules. That percentage is all that casinos need to make money from the game but is why card-counting is so frowned upon by casinos.It can shift the odds in the other direction, giving the player an edge of up to 0.5%. Casinos use many strategies to try and stop card counters, like shuffling frequently, changing rules to up the house edge, and of course, to kick card counters out of their casinos. It’s worth noting that card counting isn’t illegal, but casinos hate it because it makes the game unfair for them.
