Do you gamble? Is it worth it to gamble at casinos?

No. I am too cheap.

It is pure entertainment. I go in knowing I am going to loose $100. When it’s gone it’s gonE and if I win it’s bonus. A good time is if my money will last 4–5 hours.

Gambling at Casinos is only worth it if you are having fun and you only use money you want to spend. Slot machines are calibrated with roughly 94% to 98% return, but other games are not as easy to calculate the rate of return.

Remember, Casinos are not gambling, they are making tons of money, only the player is gambling.

My husband wins a lot at Black Jack. He starts with a certain amount, usually $100. Through several wins and losses, he goes over the $100, and then puts his $100 in his pocket and only plays with their money after that.

One time he got very lucky and paid for our entire vacation that way, but usually not.

Not frequently. But when I do, I play craps. And only a few bets on the craps table at that.

Seriously? Of course it’s not worth it to gamble. Unless you value the pleasure of the experience of gambling above and beyond the money the casino is designed such that you statistically will lose.

No and no.

Casinos are not big, beautiful bulidings because they’re losing money. They’re big, beautiful buildings because they’re making money hand over fist off the losers.

The occasional sports bet & that’s my limit. It’s a lot of fun & adds to the excitement of the event, so long as it’s kept under control, place only what you can well afford to lose.

I think gambling is fine as long as you’re not looking at it as a way to generate income.

I also heard craps has the lowest house advantage. I feel pretty comfortable playing roulette, just making outside bets. It’s the illusion of a 50/50 bet, but i’ve been pretty lucky so far. You can find all kinds of free flash games online that you can play for free to get a feel of how a game would play out.

Oh sure, I’ve gambled a few times, just for fun! I just make sure to take in a “hard limit” with me, and once that money is gone, that’s it. No more playing because “Oh, I’ll win it back!” because that rarely works out.

Nope. Ain’t got anything against it, but I have very little money to spend on something I probably won’t win lol.

It’s fun if you limit yourself to what you can afford to lose. I used to gamble up at Lake Tahoe a fair amount when I was younger, did okay playing black jack.

One time when I had just turned 21, I won a thousand dollars in a night. And one time in 1979 at the casino in Monte Carlo I started with $20 and walked out about half an hour later with close to $600. I still have a five franc chip from that trip! Bought myself a very expensive pair of French sunglasses!

But overall I am probably even to down over my lifetime, and it’s been a good twenty years since I left a casino having only lost ten or twenty dollars, it’s usually a loss of two or three hundred. I still have fun though.

You’d be better off to take that money and go shopping with it. At least you’d definitely have something to show for it!

I’m not a casino type. I live an hour from Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border and have stayed at Harrahs once in the last 10 years, played Blackjack for an hour or two, won a little, lost a little. Mostly just went to have a luxury weekend with a friend.
Not my thing but fun once in a great while. I do buy lotto tickets a couple times a month.

All the big flashy casino/hotels turn me off gambling. Those buildings were built with money people lost gambling, right?

I don’t know if this is true for all casinos, but a few things about the last one I visited creeped me out. There are no windows inside, so there’s hardly any natural light. That encourages people to lose track of time and spend more time gambling. The only seats were next to the gambling tables/machines, and then there’s the obvious free drinks for gamblers. All the shiny crap everywhere probably reminds people of all the money they could be winning, and makes them spend more.

The boyfriend is more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, and he said that they pump extra oxygen into the air inside to lift people’s moods, and that psychologists determined the exact win/loss ratio of the machines to keep people playing but bring the most profit to the casino. Who knows. But if the industry is that profitable, that means plenty of people are playing and losing… no thanks.

I recently read a book dedicated to probability in gambling.

It is very well known that the exact payoff rate of the slot machines are pre-calculated and fixed to be somewhere in the range of 94–98%. This means that a lot of people are going to win a lot of money, but over a very long run the casino will make about a nickel of profit off of every $1 spent gambling.

The very neat thing about this is that you will lose a consistent percentage of your money no matter how much money you bet. There is absolutely no way to overcome these odds. Period. For every man that makes a fortune playing slot machines, hundreds more lose their fortune.

For other games of pure chance, the odds will always be tilted in the casino’s favor. There is no difference between playing roulette and playing slot machines. Most people don’t see much danger in the two small green 0 and 00 slots on roulette wheel, but they are what mean that the casino will always make money in the end.

Some games offered in the casino are widely known to have a negative house edge, if played by a perfect human. Of course, the people who are capable of doing that are few and far between, so the casinos really don’t care. Whenever a good system becomes widely known, they just change the rules.

You won’t see me gambling any time soon…

Beyond the odds/payouts of the slot machines, the biggest change in the last twenty years is the use of magnetic strip credit cards on the slots. In the old days when one had to use coins and got paid in coins, even a small win ($5 or $10) would have a player scoop up the nickels or dimes into a cup and get dollar bills.

With the electronic credits, the casinos know people play them until they give back all the credits and are empty.

Plus it was a lot more fun and noisy to win a jackpot of 100 quarters.

@zenvelo I actually thought that the casinos had the coins drop and make a sound so that the player feels like they are winning a lot of money, encouraging them to stay longer (because winning was “fun and noisy”). But maybe that is not the case anymore.

I could never get into gambling. I did at one time use to enjoy playing chess for money, but outside of that there was nothing else I ever did enjoy about gambling. Even the chess games for money were only played on occasion.

@PhiNotPi at the casino where I live the slot machines indeed make electronic noises imitating the familiar coin drop. I was just there last week and while standing at the roulette wheel a player at a nearby slot hit a $1200 jackpot, and it took about 5 mins for the machine to complete it’s cycle of 1200 “ding-ding-ding”‘s

So I tried it out again after all this time: I won $200 playing roulette, so that’s pretty sweet.

^^Y*A*Y

@Blackberry Congratuations, but my logical side tells me to tell you never to attempt to do that again. People have lost fortunes trying to “chase their wins”.

@PhiNotPi I haven’t been back, at least not yet…...lol. I just wanted to try something different.